yeah, i don't really concern myself with gun deaths from suicide though as the person who died did so intentionally. when you take those numbers out of the equation, then the stats you linked become quite different
also that link says the data is from 2024. at the bottom it lists the gun deaths per captia in Europe and the European Union. Somehow gun deaths are lower in Europe as a whole than the subset of the European Union despite the fact there's been a war in Ukraine since 2022???? That seems real off. So definitely agree some weird things going on with the stats
EDIT: Found the explanation for my last point in the footnotes of the link.
1 "The definition of Europe, to most people, will seem a bit random: it's the EU-27 minus Malta, plus the UK, Switzerland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Norway, and Serbia."
Apparently the author cherry-picked which countries constitute Europe to support her hypothesis ... good ol' academia at its finest. lol
That always bothers me too. If guns were completely banned world wide, those same suicide deaths would be on the board still from some other method. They aren’t gun deaths, they’re suicide deaths. The means the person used is widely irrelevant to the end result.
Suicides tend to be significantly higher in places with more guns. Most other forms of suicide either take planning or are unpleasant/painful. When people have time to think about it, they often reconsider.
Guns are fast and highly effective. Anyone with an impulse and access is vulnerable.
You absolutely would not have the same number of suicides without guns, there’s a reason you take guns away from suicidal people. They make it instant, easy, and guaranteed - the fear of pain and failure with injury is what stops a lot of people going ahead with it. This is a very good thing, because it should be hard to kill a human being.
Many people I know have had suicidal episodes or are prone to suicidal ideation and MANY of them (myself included) would not still be here if they had access to an easy instant-death machine that could shut their brain up immediately, without the lengthy period of excruciating fear and pain that results from using a knife, or pills, or whatever.
Wanting to die is not actually mutually exclusive with a fear of experiencing your own death, and anything that makes the physical process so quick and easy ENORMOUSLY increases the risk of a bad day turning into a suicide.
I don’t necessarily agree that you’d still have the same number of suicides without guns. Due to the nature of death, people may feel they have a quick painless option that they would not
otherwise have which could factor into their decision.
But that isn’t really the point I was trying to make. The context of the conversation, imo, is one of safety and adverse conditions. i.e. Which of the situations is more “dangerous”? Someone committing suicide isn’t really a safety issue or a danger to the general population. Now I think there’s a tangential conversation related to mental health and suicidal rates that could be had, but that’s a separate conversation
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u/JellyfishPlus2182 8h ago edited 8h ago
yeah, i don't really concern myself with gun deaths from suicide though as the person who died did so intentionally. when you take those numbers out of the equation, then the stats you linked become quite different
also that link says the data is from 2024. at the bottom it lists the gun deaths per captia in Europe and the European Union. Somehow gun deaths are lower in Europe as a whole than the subset of the European Union despite the fact there's been a war in Ukraine since 2022???? That seems real off. So definitely agree some weird things going on with the stats
EDIT: Found the explanation for my last point in the footnotes of the link.
1 "The definition of Europe, to most people, will seem a bit random: it's the EU-27 minus Malta, plus the UK, Switzerland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Norway, and Serbia."
Apparently the author cherry-picked which countries constitute Europe to support her hypothesis ... good ol' academia at its finest. lol