This spiel now has the status of the Nicene Creed – all adherents to America are learning it by heart.

Give Wyomingites guns and they’ll kill themselves. Give them cars and …

Hell, why don’t your basic rodeo boy just kill himself by smashing his Chevy Suicido into a lightpole?

I’ll tell you why. First and most important when you use a Glock that ol gun will survive pulping your head fully intact, to be handed down to your suicidal son and his suicidal son ad infinifuckinitum. OTOH you’re definitely gonna total the truck. The truck’s goin down with you.

Secundum: It takes a whole lotta planning and a whole lotta luck to stage a successful trucko-da-fe. Maybe you’ll just go the paraplegic route. Maybe you’ll kill other people. The whole thing’s a big ol mess. At-home pulping, especially if you do it in the bathtub or shower, is neat and sweet and one hundred percent effective. State park pulping, a popular option among Wyoming’s rugged outdoorsmen, is even neater, and leaves you, as you expire, not with views of yourself careening agonizingly into a hard surface, but of calm majestic Tetons.

Thirdly: The whole public/private thing. The wreck’s gonna traumatize onlookers; and because it’s a news story it’ll make the local tv shows. Some guy popping his top at home is no news at all in Wyoming. Furthermore, beyond the extra expense your family will bear making you coffin-ready with your whole body pulverized vs. with just a little hole in your head, there’s the whole embarrassment on top of grief thing as the kinfolk deal with the community curiosity whipped up by the newspaper pix of your twisted truck/body.

More even than starvation!

The Dear Leader has now declared suicide illegal.

And, as this local points out, they’re still stiffing suicide prevention in the state which boasts by far the highest rate of self-slaughter.

The only thing baffling about the local’s commentary is his calling legislative indifference to rampant head-shooting-off in his state “baffling.” Nothing could be less baffling. Wyoming loves violence, and especially gun violence. Wyoming hates government. The two things that frighten Wyomingites the most are

1. A losing season at UW footballl.
2. Any form of government interference in anything any Wyomingite wants to do with a gun, up to and including his sovereign right to blast his fuckin head off with one. Got it? Now fuck off.

Sing the state song with me.

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In the far and mighty West,

Where the lonely drunk seeks rest,

There’s a Remington that fits him like a glove.

The bloody chest of this lost man…

It’s where he took his one last stand

In Wyoming, dead and drunk, the State I love!

Wyoming, Wyoming!

Trump’s [current] struggle is simple because he is simple: All he is is appetite – for fame, power, sex, admiration – shorn of any interior life and unencumbered by exterior attachments.

More here. And here. And here.

I mean. You know. Sing it.

She’s come undone
She didn’t know what she was headed for
And when I found what she was headed for
It was too late

Our most suicidal state does it its way.

A Ford F-150 truck [drove] through the guardrail at Lookout Point on Casper Mountain.

… 43-year-old Lowell ‘Leroy’ Campbell was the individual who drove his vehicle through the metal barrier…

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Took a big bite out of that thing.

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Natrona County is a suicide epicenter even for Wyoming.

It’s important to remind ourselves of these numbers, and to act – i.e., vote – so that the will of the minority is no longer able to tyrannize over the will of the majority.

Babe, that’s okay. On AK-47s we’re good. Might use you for grenades and belts, but our kids are already cool with AK-47s.

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She will proudly plead guilty today, her only regret being her failure to carry out 9/11-style mass murder on an American college campus.

They’re all over the news, and they’re of two kinds:

1. The reasonably explicable variety, which features people unable to sustain high levels of isolation and rigor, as in the recent rash of suicides on a navy ship. The numbers got so high that the navy evacuated the ship. These suicides share traits with prisoner suicide.
2. The more mysterious phenomenon of highly successful people destroying themselves at the height of their power and influence. Here we might think of the 2019 death of Alan Krueger; more recently, several young women athletes, all of whom had just won tournaments and awards, killed themselves. A highly promising young tv star just killed herself. On the verge of her induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Naomi Judd killed herself.

The cases of Judd and Krueger seem to involve a kind of existential exhaustion after years-long struggles with clinical depression. The powerful drugs, the endless therapy sessions, the setbacks – everything takes a toll on someone already fatigued and undermined. OTOH, although many young suicides have already exhibited some signs of being troubled, there’s nonetheless an impulsive – almost panicked – feel to some of these deaths. Bizarrely, their fate doesn’t seem gradual, but rather the outcome of a sudden access of horror at the thought of existing for one more second. Their end resembles a psychotic break featuring an insupportable hatred of being.

… but the death of a very young, championship, Stanford University athlete in her dorm room has everyone thinking it.

Thinking too of how shocking we always find these sorts of deaths – sudden deaths of brilliant, beautiful, vivacious winners seemingly at the top of their form. Soccer team captain, “fiercely competitive,” Katie Meyer was a senior at one of America’s great universities who had taken on a challenging major: International Relations with a minor in history. She could have done pretty much anything.

If it was suicide, and not some unforeseen sudden health crisis (heart failure, for instance), we will probably hear that Meyer in fact suffered from depression; we might hear that her underlying problem escalated as she pondered her imminent transition to post-university life. Or she might have been fragile enough to have been sent reeling by a romantic breakup…

In any case, it’s notoriously true that super-elite athletes may be more prone to depression, for all kinds of reasons.

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Update: Self-inflicted.

More depressed drunk dudes with forty guns in their house blast their heads off in Wyoming than in any other American state, and the state aims to keep it that way. A pathetic suicide hotline, virtually no psychiatrists, guns up the wazoo, stoic lonely cowboy culture, no interest even in talking about it – Wyoming has refined the suicide brew to the point where its national blasted-head dominance is unquestioned. Rates in the US are around 13 suicides per 100,000 people; it’s not unusual to find counties in Wyoming where rates are over 50 per 100,000.

So here’s a typical (rare) article about suicide in Wyoming. The graphic shows the one demographic least likely to do the deed – a white woman. The article itself fails to put guns front and center, even though it’s clear to the densest idiot that suicide rates are way higher in states where gun ownership is highest, and lowest where ownership is lowest.

But of course Wyoming doesn’t want to go there; it doesn’t want to say anything negative about our bestest bud Mr Beretta.

UD’s been compiling, during this Suicide Prevention Month, the many forms of writing out of Wyoming about that state’s appalling suicide rate that never mention guns.

Though firearms are the third-most common method for attempting suicide, they are responsible for the largest share of suicide deaths because they are so lethal. Nationally, nearly two-thirds of all deaths by firearm are due to suicide, and Wyoming has had the highest rate of suicide by firearm of any state over the last 15 years. Studies have linked higher rates of gun ownership with increased risk of suicide death, but in Wyoming, which also has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the country, this is an unpopular topic. As Tom Morton of the Casper Star-Tribune put it in a series of articles about Wyoming’s suicide epidemic, guns and suicide are the “third rail of Wyoming culture.”

So for instance a University of Wyoming news page yesterday touted the work on Wyoming suicides of one of their psychology professors. Let’s take a look.

‘[Carolyn] Pepper’s research team at UW’s Stress and Mood Lab is using nationally collected health data to understand what factors are specific to the Mountain West’s suicide rate. The stoic, individualistic Western mindset is one possible explanation… The Stress and Mood Lab initially studied demographic factors such as age, race, urbanization level and gender. Although all of these were elevated factors in the Mountain West, they did not explain why suicide rates are so high. The research team is now shifting focus to the cultural factors of living in a state with a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality.’

Hm yes that bootstraps thing… You see it in ‘Deer Hunter’ states like Pennsylvania too, but they have strikingly fewer guns and less suicide than Wyoming…

‘“I kept thinking someday I should study suicide, but I was sure that someone was already doing this research,” Pepper says. “I waited and waited, but no psychologist was looking at suicide in Wyoming.”’

She was sure cuz… you know… when they’re dropping like flies in your state… when some counties in your state – like Platte – are just stupendously suicidal… you figure the best social scientists around are hard at work on it. But that third rail! Why bother? Just keep ignoring the Uberti in the room and you won’t piss off anyone.

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Let’s pile on. When you add to all of this Wyoming’s insanely low covid vaccination rate, with the sort of death rate that goes along with that, you have to conclude that the whole state’s got a death wish.

Here’s a typical article, and believe me UD has read many of them. Not a word about taking guns away from troubled friends and relatives, or at least securing them more responsibly, or something… State by state, suicide rates track closely with gun ownership, and Wyoming also leads the nation (at the moment it trails Montana – also Suicide Central – by a bit) in gun ownership… So you’d think experts and commentators there would have what to say about all those instant death appliances lying around the house, beckoning…

But the state of Wyoming seems to consider it rude to mention that guns in that state are FAR more about suicide than self-protection or homicide. Just bad form.

… take note of the awful drumbeat coming from the January 6 police.

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Police have among the highest suicide rates in the country. They’ve got guns and know how to use them; they witness and take part in traumatizing events all the time; they may medicate stress and despair and anger with alcohol, which may get out of control; and they have a strong “buddy” ethos (this last one goes to the contagion effect).