farson135 said:
It's akin to saying death is fatal 100% of the time.
Yes. Unfortunately y'all keep shooting past the obvious. Things that are deadly are deadly for a reason. If that reason is used to kill oneself then it is all equally deadly.
What does this even mean? I'm really struggling to understand the bit that I bolded, because it makes about as much sense as "And ye mome raths outgrabe."
I have shown, with statistics, that suicide attempts involving a firearm result in more fatalities than other methods. People tend not to keep trying over and over until they get it "right" and I believe that this is a good thing. You seem to think that they should man the fuck up and do the job properly, the pussies.
Different suicide methods have different rates of "success", if we can term it that.
Wait, what? Is that progress? Boffo.
Get over the fact that a shotgun to the face is more deadly than cutting your wrists, taking pills, gassing yourself or any other method.
Not by necessity. Bleeding out and the subsequent brain death is just as deadly as brain death through high speed lead. In fact bleeding out is a better guarantee because shot does weird things when it hits bone.
*Sighs* So now you're an expert on bleeding to death. Ok, should have known. I'm ducking out of this after this post. Not because you've "won", or because I've changed my mind. The whole thing is getting beyond silly now and I don't think
you even know what your position on suicide is. You just
agreed that different methods have different "success" rates and then you
didn't agree.
This quote seems appropriate:
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Alice in Wonderland.
If you look here:
http://www.teensuicidestatistics.com/statistics-facts.html
we can see the differences in suicide amongst young people by gender.
"Teen suicide statistics show differences in the ways boys and girls handle suicide. While girls think about attempted suicide about twice as much as boys, boys are actually four times more likely than girls to actually die by killing themselves.
The disparity in the number of "successful" suicide attempts between boys and girls is probably explained by the methods that each use when attempting to kill themselves.
Girls who attempt suicide are more likely to try killing themselves by overdosing on pills or by cutting themselves. Cutting is a behavior that is more common among girls. Additionally, overdosing on pills is a less violent way to commit suicide. Some girls even choose pills because it allows them time to "stage" their appearance before. Some girls find it more "romantic" to die in such a way.
Boys are more likely to choose a method of attempted suicide that is more lethal - and quick. Boys more often use guns (60 percent of all suicides in the United States make use of a gun), jump from great heights or hang themselves. This is why they are more likely to die in a suicide attempt. By the time someone discovers a problem, it is usually too late to prevent death. "
The difference is down to the
method.
Just so that I know, please answer the following question.
Given that person a decides to kill themselves and proceeds to make a single attempt on their life, do you think that they are more likely to succeed if they put a shotgun in their mouth and pull the trigger, or if they cut their own throat?
Yeah, they hang themselves mainly. Second most common method for males is firearm. So what? Lithuania and the USA are hardly comparable countries. Imagine how high US rates might be if it had a similar history.
So what? You are telling me that the presence of firearms causes more successful suicides but in Lithuania, where they have almost no guns, the suicide rate is one of the highest in the world (the highest in many years).
No, I'm saying that if Lithuanians had ready access to firearms, the rate may well be higher because there would be more successful attempts. Similarly, if the USA had a similar history to Lithuania, the suicide rate may be higher. If you look at the link that you posted:
http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide_rates/en/
Assuming that it is accurate, which I have no reason to doubt, we can see that quite a few of the former Soviet states have pretty high rates of suicide. I assume that this is because of social issues that are at least partly caused by their complicated political history, what with them having been repressive dictatorships and all that. Quite unlike the USA.
So what? Who knows how much higher their rates might be if they had ready access to firearms?
They manage to kill themselves fine without firearms. You try and say that their suicide rates would be higher but do you have any proof?
No, I don't. I postulated a hypothesis based on the information I've recently been reading. Given that suicide by firearm is by far the most lethal method, it didn't seem to unreasonable to think that if they had ready access to guns, there would be more successful attempts. At least in the Bizarro universe I must inhabit.
Nope. If your life has become intolerable, I think you should be able to end it painlessly. That is however not the crux of this matter.
Actually it is. At what point does it become immoral to force a person to continue living? After they try to commit suicide two, three, four, five, or more times? There was a person at a neighboring high school that was like that. They had him committed and forced him to stay alive in misery despite the fact that he wanted to die. At what does it stop being moral to preserve live and instead become amoral?
I assume you mean
immoral, but I dunno. I'm not an ethicist. Some people do need to be hospitalised for their own protection. One of my distant cousins was a paranoid schizophrenic who had to be locked up for his own safety a number of times. I would hope that we at least agree that
in the vast majority of cases, it would be preferable to support and help a depressed young (or old) person than to say "Fuck it, we've spent long enough on that one. Bin him bring in the next subject." The example you use is an extreme case. As we know, the plural of anecdote isn't evidence. It's anecdotes.
Look, I am not saying that the presence of guns equals less murder but I am stating that socioeconomic-cultural conditions have always and will always trump the presence of an object.
I don't disagree with you. They do make it easier to kill someone though. And I know your natural instinct is to say, "Bullshit, they'd just use a knife, hammer or a rubber chicken with a pulley." I don't accept that. If it was the case, you wouldn't have so many gun murders.Pointing a gun, pulling the trigger and watching the target fall isn't the same psychologically as bludgeoning somebody repeatedly with a blunt object until their skull caves in or stabbing them multiple times and getting covered in their blood. And yes, I know you have a bad-ass Ka-bar that would cleave someone in twain with one mighty slash. The problem is that it might get stuck in a rib and then where would you be? Talk about embarrassing.
