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I write about super-suicidey places like Natrona County Wyoming from a distance. Here’s a writer who went out there.

At this stage of his life, [Natrona County Commissioner Dallas] Laird finds that he cries often. He wonders whether it’s his age, or if there’s simply a lot to cry about, or maybe it’s some mixture of the two. [A young man who recently killed himself] was loved, and yet he didn’t seem to believe it. How could that be? What is happening in his community? He thinks that most families don’t know what to do when someone is in crisis, or they can’t afford therapy. Guns are everywhere, woven into the fabric of rural American culture. Hunting elk and moose is a tradition that connects one generation to the next. Children are taught to shoot. Notions about self-protection, and what it means to stand sentry before your family, have become like a religious creed, even when the real danger tends to lurk within. 

Laird believes too many people feel like they’re going nowhere, and that feeling worms its way into the soul, infects it, until the day comes when they grab a firearm. In Wyoming, more than 85 percent of gun deaths are suicide.

Margaret Soltan, January 15, 2025 6:51AM
Posted in: guns

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