A Few Questions Worth Asking About Guns, Suicide, and “Public Health”
A response to a well-intended hunting-season message
Buckrail reported recently that the Teton County Health Department and the Community Prevention Coalition of Teton County are asking hunters to keep suicide in mind as they get their rifles out for the season. (https://buckrail.com/health-dept-urges-hunters-to-remain-aware-of-mental-health-suicide-risks/) The message recommended locking unloaded firearms, storing ammunition separately, checking on hunting partners, saving 988 in your contacts, and offering to hold a friend’s gear if he is having a rough patch.
Let me start where I expect to be doubted, which is at the beginning.
I think the people who wrote that message want fewer of their neighbors to die. So do I. I have no quarrel with a man who locks his rifle, and less than no quarrel with a man who drives across the valley to sit with a friend and take his guns home for a week. That is what neighbors are for. If somebody reading this is in the dark place right now, 988 answers by call or text at any hour, and I would rather you use it than finish this article.
Notice also what the Coalition did not do. It did not yet ask for a law. It did not ask for a storage mandate, an inspection, or a penalty. It made a request of free men and asked them to think it over. A request is not a command, and I mean to treat it as the request it was.
So this is not an argument against suicide prevention, and it is certainly not an argument for careless storage. It is an argument that four different questions got bundled into one message, and that they are worth setting out on the table separately: what the evidence shows, what actually causes what, who gets to decide, and how much of the truth the public is thought able to handle.
Where I stand, so you can discount me accordingly
You should know my starting point before I start arguing, because it colors everything after.
I believe a man owns his own life. Not his community, not his county, not his priest, not his doctor, and not the state. If he owns anything at all, he owns that. Which means the decision about whether he goes on living is his to make, and it stays his even when he makes it badly.
That does not mean I have no opinion about how he uses it. I have a great many opinions and I often hand them out freely to people I care about, whether they asked or not. If you drink a six-pack of Coca-Cola every day, I might tell you it is going to shorten your life and that it is a stupid way to die. If you are drinking yourself to death slowly, I might say so. And if you are thinking about ending your life quickly, I will tell you the same thing with a good deal more urgency, because I have watched what it does to the people left behind, and because in some cases I believe the man would have wanted to be alive a month later.
But those are opinions offered to a free man, not instructions issued to a subject. The difference between those two things is most of what I write about.
I will not pretend this position costs me nothing. It is genuinely painful to hold a principle that permits people I love to make permanent decisions I would give almost anything to prevent. Suicide is not a policy abstraction to anyone who has stood in a kitchen with a family afterward. But a principle held only when it is comfortable is not a principle; it is a preference wearing better clothes. I hold this one until somebody shows me it is wrong, and I will change it that same day if they do.
What the evidence actually says
Now start where the other side is strongest, because their ground is real.
When a firearm is used in a suicide attempt, the person very seldom (11%) survives. Nobody serious disputes this and those of us who like firearms should not try. The best national data covering both attempts and deaths show a stark split: firearms are used in only a small share of the suicide attempts that reach a hospital, and yet they account for a majority of the deaths. Poisoning runs the other direction — by far the most common method in recorded attempts, and a small share of the deaths. Those two sentences are the whole empirical core of the lethal-means argument, and they are true.
One limitation is worth stating. Data like that captures attempts that reached an emergency room, a hospital bed, or a coroner. Attempts that never entered the medical system are not counted at all, which if anything means the less-lethal methods are undercounted further still.
There is also good evidence behind the claim that suicidal intent can be brief. A 2023 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences followed 105 adults who had experienced suicidal thoughts in the previous week, over forty-two days, including stretches where they were asked every ten minutes. Elevated states of suicidal thinking lasted, on average, one to three hours. The idea that a crisis can pass is not invented propaganda. It is a real finding and it deserves to be taken seriously.
And there are two natural experiments cited in nearly every discussion of this subject, both worth actually learning rather than just naming. In 2006 the Israeli Defense Forces stopped sending soldiers home on weekend leave with their issued weapons. Suicide among the affected young men fell roughly forty percent, concentrated in weekend firearm deaths, with no significant change on weekdays. In Switzerland, the 2003 “Army XXI” reform cut the size of the army roughly in half and with it the number of army rifles sitting in Swiss homes. Researchers found a lasting drop in both firearm suicide and total suicide among the affected men, and estimated that about twenty-two percent of the reduction was offset by people using other methods.
Those findings deserve to be acknowledged, not explained away.
But look at what those studies actually studied
Here is the part that falls out of the simplified version.
Consider what both of those famous experiments have in common. In each case, a government stopped handing out its own rifles to its own soldiers. Nobody’s property was taken. No home was searched. No citizen was compelled to do one thing. The state reduced its own inventory, and fewer government employees died by their own hand.
That is a real finding. It is also a finding about how a government manages government property. It gets used, constantly, to support conclusions about private ownership and private storage — which is a different subject that neither study tested.
The Israeli study carries a second caution, and the honest thing is to point out that the caution comes from the researchers and reviewers themselves, not from me. Both firearm and non-firearm suicide were falling in Israel across those years, and firearm suicide among Israeli men in their late twenties — men the weekend policy never touched — fell by a similar proportion in the same period. The most-cited evidence in the field admits it cannot fully separate its effect from the trend it was sitting inside. I respect it more for saying so.
Nobody has established the stopwatch, either. The research does not show that ten seconds of extra access time prevents a suicide, or twenty seconds, or two minutes, or five. There is no demonstrated number of minutes at which a locked box causes a man to set down a decision. What the evidence supports is broad: reducing quick access to a highly lethal method appears to reduce deaths in some populations. What it does not supply is the tidy story in which distress leads to decision leads to a locked box leads to a few minutes passing leads to the wish dissolving leads to the man living.
That story is plausible. It may well be common. But the effect could involve delay, or another person walking in, or somebody giving up on a preferred method, or switching to something less lethal, or just the passage of an hour, in any mix. A plausible mechanism and a proven one are not the same animal. The difference matters because it is the proven-sounding version that gets printed.
Two wounds, and the difference between them
There is a version of this conversation that almost never happens in a newspaper, and it belongs here.
Talk about suicide and firearms long enough in this country and you end up talking about veterans and cops. The numbers are not gentle. The VA’s most recent report counted 6,398 veteran suicides in 2023. After adjusting for age, male veterans died by suicide at a rate roughly fifty percent higher than comparable non-veteran men, and female veterans at about double the rate of non-veteran women. Firearms were involved in 73.3 percent of veteran suicides, against 52.9 percent among other adults.
So the storage conversation lands hard on that population. Fine. But notice which conversation almost never gets the same attention.
There are two distinct injuries here, and running them together does real harm to the men carrying them.
PTSD is a formal diagnosis, and it is built around fear. It requires exposure to death or serious threat, and it shows up as intrusive memories, nightmares, avoidance of reminders, and a nervous system stuck in the on position. Its question is: am I still in danger?
Moral injury is something else. The term came from psychiatrist Jonathan Shay in 1994, working with Vietnam veterans, and was developed further by Brett Litz and his colleagues in 2009. It describes what happens to a man who did something, failed to stop something, or watched something that violated his own deepest sense of right — or who was betrayed by an authority he trusted to know better. Its core is not fear. Its core is guilt, shame, grief, and the collapse of meaning. Its question is: am I still a good man? Can I be forgiven?
The two often travel together, but they are not the same wound and they do not answer to the same treatment. A man can lose the nightmares entirely and still be unable to forgive himself for a checkpoint in 2007. He is not cured. He has been treated for the injury that had a billing code.
And moral injury does not have one. It is not in the DSM, and there is no VA rating for it. The wound the government most reliably inflicts is the wound its own system is least equipped to name.
Consider what that means. The state sends a young man somewhere, hands him a rifle, gives him orders, and requires him to do things that a decent man cannot afterward square with the person he thought he was, despite Grossman’s persuasive work to bulletproof young men’s minds. Then, years later, when the man is dead in a garage in Wyoming, the institutional response is a reminder about trigger locks.
I do not say that to be cruel to anyone in prevention work. Trigger locks are cheaper than an honest reckoning with what we ask of these men and why, and they can be recommended without anyone in authority having to answer for anything. One more number from the VA’s own report: 61 percent of the veterans who died by suicide in 2023 had not received VA care in the previous year. The institution that made the promise was not in contact with three out of five of them. That is not a storage problem.
What, exactly, are we trying to prevent?
Here is a question nobody asks out loud.
Is the goal to prevent suicide attempts, or suicide deaths, or suicides involving firearms, or impulsive suicides, or every intentional death including the settled decision of a competent adult?
Those are five different goals, and they can be achieved at each other’s expense.
Say deaths involving firearms fell by half, but every prevented death was replaced by another method and the total never moved. An outfit measuring firearm deaths could announce a victory. An outfit measuring suicide could not. Now say instead that people who would have used a firearm used something far less lethal and most of them lived. The number of attempts might not change at all while deaths fell hard — and that would be a real and precious thing.
Statistics do not interpret themselves. Somebody picks the denominator, and the pick is rarely announced.
The question under the question
Consider two men who get treated, in most of this literature, as one man.
The first is in an acute crisis. His wish to die may last ninety minutes and may contradict everything he wanted last week and everything he will want on Thursday of next week.
The second is a competent adult who has weighed his situation over weeks, months or years and reached a settled conclusion about the end of his own life.
Treating those two as identical is not a scientific position. It is a moral claim wearing a lab coat.
And the argument for stepping in with advice for the first man is genuinely strong. Anyone serious about human ife should wrestle with it rather than wave it off: an acute suicidal state can temporarily wreck a man’s ability to act on his own enduring preferences, and because death is permanent while a delay is not, an interruption may protect his life wishes rather than override it. I find that argument respectable.
But it stops exactly where it stops. Interrupting an impaired man’s immediate wish does not establish a standing authority over sane adults’ bodies, property, or end-of-life decisions. That further step needs its own argument, made in the open, and no study can supply it. If we are going to take it, we owe some answers nobody seems eager to write down: who decides that a man is incapacitated, on what evidence, for how long, and with what recourse for the fellow who turned out to be guilty of nothing but being sad in front of the wrong person.
Effectiveness is not permission
I want to say the next part as plainly as possible, because everything else in this article is decoration hung on it.
There are two entirely separate questions here, and they get welded together so often that most people no longer notice the seam.
The first is: would it work? That is a question about the world, and evidence can answer it.
The second is: may we do it? That is a question about people, and no amount of evidence touches it.
A great many people can want something for your life. They can want it sincerely. They can want it with tears in their eyes. They might have run the numbers, and the numbers can be on their side, and every reasonable person in the county can nod along. None of that gives them the right to reach into your house and arrange your affairs for you. A preference is still a preference when a majority holds it. Wanting something badly on another man’s behalf is not a form of ownership, and it does not become one by being popular, well-intentioned, or correct.
Test it with a proposal nobody has made South of Lake Ontario, so nobody has to defend it.
Suppose firearms, ropes and the other common means were required to be kept in government lockers. A man wanting his rifle back files a request online, waits seventy-two hours, and then comes to collect it. A cooling-off period, applied evenly, no confiscation, nothing permanent — everything you own is still yours, you simply have to ask and wait.
Now be honest about the empirical question. That policy might well reduce the number of deaths. I am not going to pretend otherwise in order to win an argument. Given what we know about how fast a crisis can pass, seventy-two hours is a long time, and it is entirely plausible that some men would still be alive.
And it would still be wrong. Not wrong because it failed. Wrong because a free man does not submit a request to retrieve his own property, and does not sit through a waiting period imposed by people who have decided they know his mind and his future better than he does.
If the architecture still sounds reasonable, run it on a different appetite. Put a lock on every freezer in Wyoming. Before the box opens, a one-minute recording asks whether you have really thought about this, whether you might prefer to make the smarter choice than ice cream tonight, whether the person you want to be a year from now would want you eating this. Applied to everyone, no exceptions, and I will stipulate for the sake of argument that it works — that the state gets measurably healthier.
Nobody would tolerate that for a week. And notice that the reason has nothing whatever to do with whether it works. The reason is that it is nobody’s business. We already know, in our bones, that a good outcome produced by managing a grown man like inventory is not the same thing as a good outcome, and that a life directed by other people is not improved by being directed well.
The whole distinction comes down to one word. When a friend takes your rifles home for a week because you asked him to, that is two free men doing something decent. When the same rifles sit behind the same lock because somebody decided on your behalf, it is a different act entirely, whatever the storage arrangement looks like from the outside. Consent is not a detail of the policy. Consent is the whole of what separates help from control, and it does not stop mattering because the people doing the controlling are kind, or credentialed, or right.
“Public health” is an abstraction
Now a phrase so familiar we hardly look at it.
There are individual human beings. Each has a body, a history, a situation, and one life. Add up their outcomes and you get something genuinely useful that we call public health.
But the public has no lungs. It has no bloodstream. It does not feel pain, does not get sick, and does not become suicidal. Individuals do. “Public health” is an abstraction — a valuable one for those with a collectivist worldview, and an abstraction all the same.
That matters because institutions slide, almost invisibly, from one sentence to a very different one:
We measured a bad outcome across a population.
Therefore an institution has authority to change individual behavior in order to improve that number.
The first is description. The second is political philosophy. No mortality table gets you from one to the other, and the jump is usually made without anyone noticing the subject was changed.
The same fog hangs around “public schools,” a phrase suggesting an institution belonging to the public, when in practice the government collects the money, writes the rules, hires the staff, and sets the curriculum. Language can hide who is deciding for whom, and it generally hides it in favor of whoever picked the language.
Enter the central planner
When officials try to improve population numbers through rules, incentives, restrictions, or messaging, they are doing central planning. I do not mean that as an insult. I mean it as a description: a small group gathers data about a population, decides which outcomes should be optimized, and designs something meant to redirect the choices of thousands of people it will never meet.
Central planning sometimes works. It always runs into the same wall, which I take up at more length in the first essay of my book Too Complex to Command. Complex human systems hold enormous amounts of scattered knowledge. Every man knows things about his own circumstances and his own tradeoffs that cannot be loaded into any database and cannot be known by a distant decider, however well-meaning and however credentialed. Sometimes the credential is the whole trouble: what the expert class lacks in local knowledge, it more than makes up in its confidence that local knowledge is not the sort of thing experts require.
Suicide is an unusually deep version of the problem, because here the planner is not deciding how wide to build a road. He is making assumptions — often without saying them, sometimes without noticing them — about reason, incapacity, acceptable risk, autonomy, and finally about who holds authority over another man’s continued existence.
Those assumptions deserve daylight. That is all I am after.
A short thought experiment
Suppose some means existed by which a competent adult could end his life legally, cheaply, and without violence. I am not advocating it in this article. I am borrowing it to expose an assumption.
If many people preferred it, deaths involving firearms would likely drop sharply even if the number of people choosing to die never moved at all. What would we conclude? Not that fewer people wanted to die. We would conclude that people had changed tools.
The principle generalizes: how common a method is does not, by itself, tell you the cause of the behavior. People reach for whatever they think will work.
The real world complicates this, and I will not pretend otherwise, because currently accessible methods are nowhere near equally lethal. That difference is exactly why the lethal-means research is worth taking seriously. It is also why that research answers a question about mortality and leaves the question of authority right where it found it.
When education slides into persuasion
This is the part of the Buckrail piece that interests me most, and it has nothing to do with guns.
Any outfit trying to reduce suicide faces a real problem. Most people are never going to read epidemiology papers. Nobody studies confidence intervals and substitution effects before loading the truck for elk season. So what should such an outfit do to reach the audience they reckon they should reach?
There is a continuum, and it runs downhill:
Education — give people enough to reach their own conclusion.
Simplification — strip out the technical parts while staying accurate.
Persuasion — emphasize the true facts that push toward a chosen behavior.
Propaganda — select, frame, or leave out information mainly to produce behavior rather than understanding.
Let me put the case for sliding down that list as strongly as its defenders would, because it is not a stupid case. A defender says: people will never study this, we have decent evidence that certain behaviors probably save lives, and our job is to say it in whatever simple form gets more people to do it. If a simplified message saves someone’s son, or father, or hunting partner, then arguments about epistemology are a luxury bought with other men’s lives.
That argument should not be mocked. I have no clever answer to the father.
But it costs something, and the cost is not small. Once authorities decide that citizens cannot be trusted with complexity, we have installed a class of people who decide both what the public should do and how much of the truth the public needs in order to do it. That is no longer epidemiology. That is a theory of government, and it is one in which the governed are material to be shaped rather than men to be reasoned with.
Nobody had to intend anything
Here is where I part company with some of my friends, who will tell you the hunting-season message was an attack on gun ownership dressed up as concern.
I do not think anyone at that Coalition knowingly sat down to chip away at firearms. I think something more ordinary happened, and more consequential.
The Coalition’s prevention work is funded, as its coordinator told Buckrail plainly and to her credit, by state and federal grants rather than county money. Grants come with priorities based on ideologies. Priorities come with framing. And a message written under a grant will reliably describe the problem the way the grantmaker describes it — not through anybody’s spitefulness or dishonesty, but because that is the language everyone in the building already speaks, the language the reports are written in, and the language the next application will have to be written in too.
So look at the message that came out. It led with Wyoming’s rank in firearm suicide. It gave method-specific advice about firearms and ammunition. It did not say a comparable word about the other means that together account for roughly a quarter of these deaths, nor about the fact that most attempts do not involve a firearm at all. Every one of those choices is defensible on its own. Taken together they produce something that functions as an argument about guns, whether or not one person in that office wanted it to.
That is worth saying without accusing anybody of bad faith, and it is the more uncomfortable observation of the two. A conspiracy needs conspirators, and can be denied. An incentive needs nobody at all, and cannot.
I will add one more thing, offered without heat. Grant money is not donated. It is collected, and collected from people who were never asked and who may well disagree with the message their money now buys. A neighbor who takes out an ad to persuade me has done nothing but persuade, and he is welcome to try. An agency that bills me for the ad has done something else, and calling the bill a grant does not change what it is. My objection there is not to the advice. It is to the invoice.
What I would rather have read
Suppose the hunting-season message had said something like this:
Firearms are extremely lethal when used in suicide attempts. Research shows suicidal intent often changes a lot within a few hours, and several natural experiments have found fewer suicides when quick access to firearms was reduced. Researchers have not established how many minutes of delay make the difference, and how much of this applies to any one person is uncertain. If you are worried a friend is in a temporary crisis, voluntarily putting time and distance between him and a highly lethal method may give him another chance to reconsider. If you do not have close and trusted friends, 988 answers day and night.
I could live very comfortably with that. It respects the evidence. It respects the uncertainty. Most of all it respects the reader, and it does not ask anybody to pretend a mortality statistic has settled a moral question it was never built to reach.
The larger principle
I do not expect Teton County to share my conclusions about firearms, government, or the end of a life. That is rather the point. These are hard questions and thoughtful people land in different places.
My concern starts when several separate claims get compressed into one moving message: suicide is tragic; firearms are unusually lethal; therefore less access may mean fewer deaths; therefore agencies should promote certain practices; therefore hesitating about those practices is hesitating about safety itself.
Every “therefore” in that chain hides an assumption worth its own look. The empirical question is what reduces deaths. The causal question is why. The philosophical question is who legitimately decides. The central planner’s policy question is what, if anything, government affiliated institutions ought to do about any of it. Those four should not be collapsed into one, and when they are, it is fair to ask who benefits from the collapsing.
Maybe the best thing a community newspaper can do is not to tell its readers what to conclude. Maybe it is to trust them with the complexity.
That is certainly less effective as behavior modification. It would be far better as public conversation — and in a county full of people who can smell being handled from a mile off, I suspect it would persuade more of them anyway.
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