Why is a standard issue anti-gun screed with moldy “common sense gun control” talking points being featured in “Psychology Today” under the guise of a “How to prevent suicides” article? Oh, lots of reasons, such as..
- Anti-gun fanatics will use every opportunity imaginable to repeat their cant;
- The fact that their objective, to somehow void the Second Amendment, is impossible doesn’t dissuade them from wasting our time;
- Like most of the print media in the sciences, “Psychology Today” has been captured by the doctrinaire Left and allowed what should be a non-partisan topic be polluted by progressive activism;
- Too many academics, scholars and experts today have no regard for integrity, and believe that they must accomplish their ideological goals by any means necessary, and
- To someone whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
“Reducing Gun Violence, Particularly Gun Suicides: What we can learn from other countries when it comes to reducing gun deaths” announces its bias and how that bias has made its “expert” author stupid right in the headline. Other countries have nothing to offer us as far as gun policies are concerned. They do not have the same culture as the United States, nor do other nations enshrine individual liberty as securely as the United States. Other nations did not rely on guns and self-determination to the extent that the U.S. population has throughout its history, and other nations are far more submissive to government interference with their rights than Americans are.
The clueless author, John Bateson, is an expert on suicide who appears to know nothing about guns except that they are bad, hence the fewer guns there are, the better. Here are “Psychology Today’s” brilliant “key points” with which it introduces the article:
- The U.S. is the only country where guns are the primary means of suicide. [Comment: So what? As I just said, the U.S. has a unique gun culture. What solid data is there that states that a significant number of suicides would not take place at all were a gun not available? (The answer is none.)
- Several times gun laws elsewhere have changed after a single, horrific event. [Comment: Again, so what? On Ethics Alarms, that’s called “The Barn Door Fallacy.” The author is appealing to emotion: when a single event sparks radical change, that change is usually driven by emotion and is excessive.
- Steps can be taken to reduce gun violence, particularly gun suicides. [Comment: Yet the article doesn’t contain any.]
Here is how the article concludes:
Several steps can be taken to reduce gun violence in this country, particularly gun suicides. One is universal background checks. Another is implementing a 10-day waiting period to buy a firearm. A third is enacting “red-flag” laws that enable police and immediate family members to remove guns from people who pose a threat to themselves or to others. A fourth is requiring gun owners to store their weapons safely. A fifth is banning the sale of high-caliber assault weapons. None of these takes away the existing weapons of responsible gun owners or prevents them from buying more handguns and rifles. None infringes on their rights to protect themselves, to hunt, or to shoot recreationally. Their purpose is to ensure that firearms are used safely, the same way that traffic codes exist for drivers to operate motor vehicles safely. Is that too much to ask?
Well, yes, and I must also ask, is it too much to ask for a suicide expert to stick to his area of expertise and not use an alleged essay about suicide as a platform for a standard anti-gun piece? And is it too much to ask that an article purporting to enlighten us regarding shooting suicides offer more than the same standard nostrums anti-gun activists have been promoting for decades? The measures suggested make even less sense in the context of suicide prevention than they do as a means of preventing mass shootings.
How do universal background checks relate to suicide, rather than “let’s make it burdensome to exercise our right to bear arms”? A ten-day waiting period might conceivably prevent impulse suicides, as in, “I’m going to buy a gun and shoot myself today” but what’s stopping the suicidally minded from deciding, “Oh the hell with it, I’ll take some pills”? Excuse me if the argument isn’t persuasive: four members of my family have killed themselves, and none needed a gun. (Hanging, pills, drowning, and jumping off an overpass into an oncoming truck).
“Red Flag” laws are pre-crime; identifying people with emotional and mental illness and getting them help before they harm themselves has nothing to do with guns.
Clearly, this guy isn’t writing about suicide, he is just anti-gun. What does safe storage of one’s gun have to do with stopping a suicide? The owner goes to his safely stored gun, takes it, and shoots himself! Similarly, what do high-caliber assault weapons have to do with suicide? Who uses a semi-automatic rifle to shoot themselves? Anybody? Maybe gun owners who have terrible aim…
The obsession with politics and the now almost universal corruption of the professions with political bias has rendered all professions the one thing professions cannot be: untrustworthy.
As an ethcist, his fills me with despair and makes me want to kill myself. Where’s that woodchipper?
Ethics Alarms 
geez tell me how you really feel
you say Steps can be taken to reduce gun violence, particularly gun suicides. [Comment: Yet the article doesn’t contain any.]
and then you quote the article where it lists the steps to do those things
very confusing!
“[Comment: Yet the article doesn’t contain any.]”
Oops, I guess you forgot to finish reading the post after this point. The last part goes point by point explaining how the proposed solutions, aside from betraying a lack of knowledge about guns in general, would do little, if anything, to prevent suicides.
Only confusing if you aren’t paying attention or skimming. I explained why none of those steps are likely to have any effect on preventing suicides, and were just standard anti-gun cant. What were you reading?
the steps the author think would work are listed though.
And the point is, they won’t work, they can’t work even to reduce gun violence generally, and they have nothing to do with preventing suicide, as I explain. he doesn’t deliver on what his essay promises. He could also write “it will reduce suicides to eat more cheese and paint your face blue,” but that would also be failing to make recommendations that would accomplish his objective.
And the point is, they won’t work,
that’s a different point than what you said though.
“And is it too much to ask that an article purporting to enlighten us regarding shooting suicides offer more than the same standard nostrums anti-gun activists have been promoting for decades? The measures suggested make even less sense in the context of suicide prevention than they do as a means of preventing mass shootings.”
That’s exactly the point I made.
Other than that, trenchant observation….
Marissa
The items listed exist already. We do require background checks for hand guns and it is damn difficult to shoot yourself with a long gun. Red flag laws exist but why doesn’t the ‘“expert” identify critical pre suicide behaviors instead of focusing on firearms. Laws requiring safe storage do not prevent someone from not following them. We have laws against suicide but they don’t stop people from killing themselves.
Each and every one of the ideas presented have been offered ad nauseum by anti-gun zealots. That was Jacks point.
What other countries do to prevent suicide by gun makes no reference to the amount of suicides per capita. Does it matter if the same number or more people in other countries commit suicide by hanging or slashing their wrists because they cannot get a gun?
The goal of anti gun zealots is not to prevent gun deaths but to prevent opposition to their dominance. They don’t like opposition.
Should we assume one of the lefties’ favorite lines “My body, my choice” was unavailable for an appearance in that particular issue of PT?
Whole new dimension of the issue! Great point.
Whenever psychology is presented in a “science” context, it’s useful to consider the relative maturity of the field compared to others. There are problems considering it as science, such as difficulties constructing hypothesis, experiments and observations, let alone the ethical issues of using constructs of science to interfere with people’s lives.
Psychology is only one generation beyond development as a field of study. In terms of chemistry, we’ve boiled urine and discovered it can deflagrate when combined with ash and sulfur. The ‘corpse particles contribute to infection’ stage of germ theory comes to mind, but in terms of medicine, psychologists are more akin to be throwing knuckle bones on the ground and telling us what they think had caused illness. In terms of math, zero doesn’t even have meaning, let alone fractions or decimals. Psychology is not even in the heliocentric model of astronomy.
We saw with COVID the damage that occurs to society when one field of science bullies it’s way into public policy and takes over. Science also tells us that nearly all social creatures are equipped by evolution with weapons, that a top cause of human death is other humans organizing as governments against the individual, and that the longest continuously operating democratic republic likely hasn’t had a dictator take over because it also allows each citizen to vote “No” the loudest way possible–with a supersonic copper-jacketed lead projectile.
The thing is, suicide is. a personal choice. It does not justify restraints on private behavior to suppress suicide.
and this same side supports medically-assisted suicide.
That side is apparently immune from irony and hypocrisy detection.
No doubt about it.
That banning something makes it more difficult to comit suicide does not justify the ban.
I also agree that the law should make it crystal clear that suicide is unethical, wrong, and destructive to society and third parties. But it’s the conduct, not the method of engaging it, that is at issue.