This is a subtle and sensitive examination of the gun suicide epidemic, featuring Bob Owens, whose death was hypertypical.
[A] journalist who was friends with Owens said that many gun owners [like Owens] are afraid to tell doctors about their mental-health struggles, because they worry someone will take their weapons away.
Eh bien. UD’s heart goes out to these silent, lost, sufferers, but their logic’s a bit skewed. Surely they know they are overwhelmingly unlikely to need their twenty firearms for self-defense; surely they know (or at least intuit?) that those guns are far more likely to be used by someone in their home for suicide.
They may even know that the act will be impulsive – one drunk self-hating night; the failure to complete some task or other; a bad fight with your wife. Gun, stage left.
And it wouldn’t even be about taking the weapons away. It would be about temporarily locking them up until a crisis passed. But even that…
What does one say about flagrantly suicidal people who refuse to go to doctors and refuse to put away their guns?
December 14th, 2023 at 8:58PM
Why all this handwringing over people who wouldn’t read The Atlantic and who harbour contempt for those that do? It is hard to fathom the American left’s need to ‘understand’ those with whom they are at war. Despite rosy predictions, the NRA, Fox News, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump et.al. have remained viable and in the public eye.
Does anyone believe that “mental health care” under the US medical system can do anything about this? The best that can be said of the profiled is that they did not commit mass murder on the way to suicide as do so many of their persuasion. It is silly to make tragedies of individuals and groups committed to making statistics.
December 15th, 2023 at 7:17AM
Because they’re human beings.
December 15th, 2023 at 7:57AM
Yes.
December 15th, 2023 at 10:41AM
Your weakness, your downfall. With collateral damage.
December 15th, 2023 at 12:14PM
The impulse to suicide isn’t a weakness. We aren’t Victorians. It’s a symptom of a mental illness, one that is treatable.
As far as “collateral damage” a concealing phrase, yes, as a matter of fact, it feels better all around when you can prevent one of these things, as opposed to carrying the memory of not preventing it around.
December 15th, 2023 at 1:25PM
I refer to the simpering approach to malevolent and heavily armed individuals and groups. This is a political problem whose results have an outsized impact on the world – collateral damage.
And how would you propose to get the chap in the article to accept treatment in the first place? Talk therapy wouldn’t have cured him. Medications would have just made him a medicated paranoid with at least the same number of weapons.
December 15th, 2023 at 1:36PM
Worse than simpering. Looks to me like indifference. Judging by legislation, etc., Americans and their political reps don’t even care when children (Sandy Hook, Uvalde) are eviscerated.
I agree that doctors can only do so much for people like this man. The only thing likely to have saved him would have been the removal of guns from his home, and agreement among all family members (who also all have guns prob.) to keep him away from their guns. In this regard, a doctor might heve helped, if only by authoritatively scaring the shit out of the family.
Not all meds would have been useless. A simple anti-anxiety med might have helped.
December 15th, 2023 at 1:56PM
I meant that the article was simpering as is the American left’s belief that these people are somehow capable of being helped or as you wrote, ‘saved.’ The opposition I think enjoys the mayhem.
I do not see how his guns could have been removed. He stockpiled them especially for that contingency. His family scarcely seems better. The widow carries a gun in case her car breaks down. Any doctor attempting to “scaring the shit out of [them]” would have been on the wrong end of gunfire. Recall the violence against medical personnel when those dying of COVID were attacked by family who denied it existed.