Still on a roll about guns and suicide . . . This is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month.

[flamin lib]

https://www.thetrace.org/2016/09/gun-violence-restraining-order-suicide-reduction-connecticut/

Laws That Allow for Temporarily Removing Guns from High-Risk People Linked to a Reduction in Suicides

For every 10.5 guns collected under Connecticut’s gun violence restraining orders, one person was stopped from taking his or her own life, researchers estimate. Eleven states are considering similar policies.

After several years during which fights to expand background checks dominated the agenda of the gun reform movement, advocates are encouraging sympathetic state legislators to also consider more targeted strategies that they say could prevent shootings by people deemed at risk of harming themselves or others.

About a dozen states appear poised in their upcoming legislative sessions to consider bills that would create “risk-based” gun removal laws. Such measures allow judges to issue orders instructing police to temporarily confiscate firearms when officers, or in some instances, family members, assert that an individual poses a threat.

Legislators in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota, Michigan, and perhaps Massachusetts are expected to introduce gun violence restraining order bills next year, according to advocates and legislators in those states. California’s version of the law took effect January 1.

While high-profile shootings tend to drive the political impetus behind gun violence restraining order laws, a new study by Jeffrey Swanson, a psychiatry professor at Duke University’s School of Medicine, and nine other researchers, shows how in one state — Connecticut — gun removals from high-risk people may have prevented up to 100 suicides.

Very few states now have laws that allow families or loved ones to ask police to remove guns from a home situation. California has led the way as it has in so many other things.

Suicide is an impulsive act. It is a permanent solution to a temporary situation. It causes immeasurable heartache for families. It can be decreased with better mental health care AND with interventions with access to guns, the number one killer in suicides.

It takes a village. Let the village help prevent the tragedy of suicide.

Other posts on the topic here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/126211537

http://www.democraticunderground.com/126211481

http://www.democraticunderground.com/126211522

[billh58]

1. K & R!

Thanks for keeping this often ignored side effect of the easy access to guns in this country.