{"id":17688,"date":"2016-04-04T08:02:17","date_gmt":"2016-04-04T15:02:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/in-west-region-of-guns-and-suicide-outreach-to-curb-deaths\/"},"modified":"2016-04-04T08:02:17","modified_gmt":"2016-04-04T15:02:17","slug":"in-west-region-of-guns-and-suicide-outreach-to-curb-deaths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/in-west-region-of-guns-and-suicide-outreach-to-curb-deaths\/","title":{"rendered":"In West, region of guns and suicide, outreach to curb deaths"},"content":{"rendered":"

MONTROSE, Colorado \u2014<\/strong> Keith Carey is a gunsmith in Montrose, a town with a frontier flavor set amid the mesas of western Colorado. He\u2019s a staunch, though soft-spoken, defender of the right to bear arms.<\/p>\n

Yet now he\u2019s a willing recruit in a fledgling effort to see if the gun community itself \u2014 sellers and owners of firearms, operators of shooting ranges \u2014 can help Colorado and other Western states reduce their highest-in-the-nation suicide rates.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuicide is a tragedy no matter how it\u2019s done,\u201d said Carey, whose adult daughter killed herself with a mix of alcohol and antidepressants a few years ago on the East Coast. However, he sees the logic in trying gun-specific prevention strategies in towns like Montrose, where guns are an integral part of daily life.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very expedient for people to commit suicide by a firearm, without too much forethought,\u201d Carey said. \u201cUnfortunately, it\u2019s generally effective.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the urging of a local police commander, Carey agreed last year to participate in the Gun Shop Project, a state-funded program in which gun sellers and range operators in five western Colorado counties were invited to help raise awareness about suicide. It\u2019s a tentative but promising bid to open up a conversation on a topic that\u2019s been virtually taboo in these Western states: the intersection of guns and suicide.<\/p>\n

Carey\u2019s shop counter now displays wallet-sized cards with information about a suicide hotline. A poster by the door offers advice about ways to keep guns away from friends or relatives at risk of killing themselves.<\/p>\n

Carey says some customers take materials home, or ask a few questions. The conversations tend to be brief.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuicide is one of those morose subjects that a lot of us don\u2019t want to talk about,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s all too common. I believe any method of suicide prevention is worth a good hard try.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

By the numbers<\/strong><\/p>\n

Across the U.S., suicides account for nearly two-thirds of all gun deaths \u2014 far outnumbering gun homicides. In 2014, according to federal data, there were 33,599 firearm deaths; 21,334 of them were suicides. That figure represents about half of all suicides that year; but in several western Colorado counties, and in some other Rocky Mountain states with high gun-ownership rates, more than 60 percent of suicides involve firearms.<\/p>\n

Along with Alaska, the states with the highest rates form a contiguous bloc \u2014 Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. All have age-adjusted suicide rates at least 50 percent higher than the national rate of 12.93 suicides per 100,000 people; Montana\u2019s rate, 23.80, is the highest in the nation.<\/p>\n

Between 2000 and 2014, gun suicides increased by more than 51 percent in those states, while rising by less than 30 percent nationwide.<\/p>\n

Theories abound as to why such high rates. Commonly cited factors include the isolation and economic hard times in rural areas of these states. There\u2019s also belief that a self-reliant frontier mindset deters some Westerners from seeking help when depression sinks in.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe embrace the cowboy mentality,\u201d says Jarrod Hindman, director of Colorado\u2019s Office of Suicide Prevention. \u201cIf you\u2019re suffering, suck it up, pick yourself up by your boot straps. But that doesn\u2019t work very well if you\u2019re suicidal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Underlying all these explanations is the fact that firearms are more ubiquitous in the West than in most other parts of the country.<\/p>\n

Catherine Barber, a suicide prevention expert at the Harvard School of Public Health, says residents of gun-owning homes are at higher risk of suicide than other people \u2014 simply because a suicide attempt is more likely to involve a gun. According to federal estimates, suicide attempts involving firearms succeed 85 percent of the time, compared to less than 10 percent of attempts involving drug overdoses and several other methods.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not that gun owners are more suicidal,\u201d Barber argues. \u201cIt\u2019s that they\u2019re more likely to die in the event that they become suicidal, because they are using a gun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Colorado\u2019s Gun Shop Project is modeled after a program pioneered in New Hampshire. Barber helped design the initiative and hopes collaboration on firearm suicide prevention can spread nationwide.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the past, people shut up about this issue because they thought raising it meant raising the issue of gun control,\u201d she said. \u201cIt makes so much more sense to look at gun owners as part of the solution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hindman said that when he joined the state health department in 2004, talking about the role of firearms in suicide was discouraged. It\u2019s still a sensitive topic, he said, but some funding has materialized for gun-specific initiatives.<\/p>\n

In Montrose, Police Commander Keith Caddy has been around guns since childhood. Now he\u2019s doing outreach for the Gun Shop Project \u2014 and most of the businesses he has visited agreed to display suicide-awareness materials once they were assured it wasn\u2019t a gun-takeaway program in disguise.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s my duty to protect the community I serve,\u201d Caddy said. \u201cIf I can go out there and spend a little time talking to the gun shops, maybe the reward will be saving someone\u2019s life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Suicide prevention<\/strong><\/p>\n

Suicide presents a distinctive challenge for shooting ranges: Occasionally, someone will rent a gun, then use it to commit suicide.<\/p>\n

At the Family Shooting Center in Denver, there have been three such incidents, including two since Doug Hamilton began managing the range in 2004. Hamilton is open to letting his staff get suicide-prevention training, though he\u2019s unsure it would help. Those who killed themselves at his range exhibited no signs of stress beforehand.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuicide prevention brochures aren\u2019t something that anyone\u2019s going to pick up who has come out to our range to kill themselves,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Such challenges are familiar to Dr. Michael Victoroff, a Denver-area physician whose leisure-time passion is competitive shooting. He was at the Family Shooting Center in Denver when one of the suicides occurred there.<\/p>\n

Victoroff belongs to the American Medical Association and the National Rifle Association, and has qualms about both.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe medical community has been content not to know anything about gun culture and gun safety,\u201d said Victoroff. As for the NRA, he\u2019d like to see suicide prevention highlighted in its training materials.<\/p>\n

Over the years, firearm suicide has not been a high-profile issue for the NRA; it worries that the topic might be used to advance a gun-control agenda. Though the NRA has no position on Colorado\u2019s Gun Shop Project, it has endorsed a bill in Washington state encouraging gun dealers to participate in suicide prevention efforts, said spokeswoman Jennifer Baker.<\/p>\n

\n

Fueled by loss<\/strong><\/p>\n

Throughout Colorado, prevention efforts are fueled to a large degree by people who\u2019ve lost friends and loved ones to suicide.<\/p>\n

Cindy Haerle, a teacher and board member of the Grand Junction-based Western Colorado Suicide Prevention Foundation, grew up in \u201ca real gun family\u201d in Salida, Colorado, and had her own gun by the time she was 5. But she gave up shooting after her brother John killed himself with a pistol in 1980 at age 29.<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing is as final as a gunshot,\u201d said Haerle, who was 13 at the time.<\/p>\n

In the northwest counties of Routt and Moffatt, the Gun Shop Project is coordinated by Meghan Francone, who constantly reassures gun owners and sellers that the outreach program poses no threat. She got involved after her 15-year-old brother-in-law fatally shot himself in 2010.<\/p>\n

\u201cKeep your guns. Keep a dozen. I don\u2019t care. But please make sure they are locked and out of the reach of someone who\u2019s in crisis,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m not asking any gun shop owner to be a psychologist. I\u2019m asking them to be their brother\u2019s keeper.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MONTROSE, Colorado \u2014 Keith Carey is a gunsmith in Montrose, a town with a frontier flavor set amid the mesas of western Colorado. He\u2019s a staunch, though soft-spoken, defender of the right to bear arms. Yet now he\u2019s a willing recruit in a fledgling effort to see if the gun community itself \u2014 sellers and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":17689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-17688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17688"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=17688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}