You are suggesting a high level of corruption in the office of the Medical Examiner. I don’t think any Medical Examiner is going to list ALS or cancer as the cause of death when there is a bullet hole through the man’s skull.
The connection between the two is the whole point of the article. There is no shell game going on.
It is a deflection from the correlation of suicides and guns. The fact that homicides and even suicides may have a cultural correlation too does not invalidate the correlation with guns. It just means there are other factors too. But those other factors do not explain away the correlation noted by the Vox article.
Not at all. I am stating that physician assisted suicide is covered up on death certificates, thereby making it difficult to actually determine the extent to which suicide might or might not be more prevalent in places with more guns.
I don’t think physician assisted suicide ever involves a gun. So it is impossible to cover up a gun suicide as something else. The Vox article specifically addressed gun suicides, so I fail to see how an uncertainty in the number of physician-assisted suicide casts uncertainty on the number of gun suicides.LeafByNiggle:
Not at all. I am stating that physician assisted suicide is covered up on death certificates, thereby making it difficult to actually determine the extent to which suicide might or might not be more prevalent in places with more guns.
Suicide is the biggest gun problem; even more than homicide. Suicide and suicide threats are much more successful with guns than with alternatives. When a person who is suicidal is in a very low state of mind and they also have easy access to a gun, then that elevates the suicide rate.
That is a whataboutism. It is easy to document the cause of death with a firearm.
did you read the article I posted? it is and it isn’t. it depends on where you are.
The problem lies in being able to prove the argument in the thread title. How do we prove that suicide is more common in places with more guns when some types of suicides are covered up?
Because the statistic is only about gun suicides. Read the articles. It makes no claim about drug suicides being higher where there are guns. And gun suicides cannot be covered up in a death certificate.LeafByNiggle:
The problem lies in being able to prove the argument in the thread title. How do we prove that suicide is more common in places with more guns when some types of suicides are covered up?
What other external factor do you think should have been considered besides rurality?
I fail to see why that is a more meaningful statistic. It is quite likely that the number of attempts at suicide is about the same whether there are guns in the house or not. Is that any reason to ignore the fact that more people end up dead?
The statistic you cite doesn’t say anything one way or the other about the overall suicide rate. So it does not contradict any conclusion from other parts of the study, or disprove any causality either.
There are several reasons why that would be ineffective against suicides. One is that people with a history of depression do not show up in the criminal database unless they had been committed for treatment. Another is that someone who legitimately owned a gun and was not depressed when he bought it can become depressed. As there is no recurrent checkup for mental health, the system would not catch the change. And lastly, adolescents in a household that has a gun can just take his father’s gun.
Just need clarification: You agree doctor assisted suicide is wrong, correct?
It is not inconsequential. The right to bear arms is not absolute. The courts have allowed reasonable limitations to be placed on their use - things like requirements for storage, transportation, etc. The findings of how guns relate to suicide can certainly inform those kinds of legal restrictions.
what is your one new law that will work when the rest haven’t?
This. South Korea has the highest teen suicide rate in the world because of the huge pressure an extremely competitive and extremely expensive education system puts on their shoulders. I shudder to think what would happen with liberalized gun ownership.
It is unclear how you could know this. Presumably, it would be psychologically very difficult to actually pull the trigger and for many reasons. The likelihood of success with a powerful enough caliber weapon aimed at your temple is very high, so the (usually male) person would suspect this. He would know the finality of the act, which could make it a psychologically difficult decision. He would also anticipate substantial pain right before death, which also presumably doesn’t assist him, psychologically.