suicide by firearm Archives - Rally for our Rights

“Red Flag” Extreme Risk Protection Order ERPO laws are picking up steam across the nation. Some states have had them in place for many years, such as Connecticut who implemented theirs in 1999, or Indiana who crafted their law in 2005, and California jumped on the bandwagon in 2014. I’ve written about how ineffective they have been in those states. But the past two years, other states are quickly following suit, including Colorado who passed one of the most egregious laws this past spring. It will go into effect January 1, 2020.

But do they actually help prevent suicide?

States like Indiana pointed to stats showing suicide by firearm was decreasing, but turns out it wasn’t. It was still increasing but not at the projected rate, so they consider that a win. In addition, suicide by other methods has skyrocketed and Indiana has dropped from 19th in the country for mental health in 2011, to 45th in 2015, and in both 2016 and 2017 suicide was the tenth leading cause of death for all residents over all demographics, and the leading cause for certain demographics. Their Red Flag law was enacted in 2005.

Across the country, these laws are being touted as “suicide prevention” by anti-gun groups such as Everytown For Gun Safety and their grassroots arm, Moms Demand Action. Now, these groups have been known to tell half truths, mislead, and fear monger, but their claim that Colorado’s Red Flag law will reduce suicide is one of the most upsetting lies I have heard them tell. That’s because suicide is very near and dear to my heart. My sister committed suicide 4 1/2 years ago.

My sister was my best friend. She lived one town over, she was the mother to three, and our oldest daughters were born 5 weeks apart. Her suicide rocked my world, and I still shed tears when I think about it. I have her name with a semi-colon tattooed on my arm, my only tattoo. I will never forget the night my mother and my sister came to my home to tell me she was gone, knowing I’d take it harder than anyone else. At first I was in denial as I insisted that she must just be in the hospital, and I needed to get to her. Once past denial, I needed to know where her body was. I got on the phone and desperately started calling people until I connected with the coroner. Her body was in the morgue at a local hospital. I so desperately wanted to be with it. I couldn’t imagine my sister alone in a cold morgue, awaiting autopsy. The next morning was when reality struck. The physical pain I felt in my heart when I awoke was something I had never experienced before and haven’t experience since. Watching her children mourn was heartwrenching. For them everything changed the day she made the choice to take her life. The trajectory of their lives took a sharp, ugly turn. I would do anything to be able to go back and help her that day. But I can’t.

My sister didn’t use a firearm to take her life, although she was a gun rights supporting liberal. She used a bottle of pain pills that had been prescribed to her by her doctor.

The claims that Colorado’s “Red Flag” ERPO law will help those in a suicidal crisis is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst. You see, Colorado’s law has no mental health component to it. In fact, Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams has testified to that many times, pointing out that the legislation asks law enforcement to enter the home of a suicidal individual who owns firearms (forcibly if necessary), confiscate those firearms, and leave both the person in crisis and many other tools to follow through with the act of taking their own life.

This is not compassion. This is not empathetic. This is cruel.

There is also strong evidence that when responding to one of these suicidal ERPO’s, law enforcement will arrive with a SWAT team, not only exacerbating the crisis, but escalating it to the point of no return. Early this year, one of our supporters, Ralph Shnelvar, took his own life. He was going through a rough separation and his wife had reported to the police that he was suicidal and had a firearm. Ralph sent worrisome emails to his close friends, who immediately went to his residence to try to offer help. When they arrived, what they found instead was a large police presence and SWAT officers who spent several hours outside the home trying to get Ralph to come out of the residence. Friends and family were blocked from talking to him. Eventually two police robots were sent inside the home where they found Ralph dead. No one can tell me that SWAT did not exacerbate that entire situation, possibly causing and/or expediting the ultimate tragic death.

One of Ralph’s friends testified about this situation in front of a State Senate Committee during the “Red Flag” debate in March. Watch that video below.

This is what Colorado’s “Red Flag” law will look like. SWAT teams going after those who are in crisis, or those who are innocent, another danger we’re facing as the legislation is so poorly written. Here in Colorado a Tinder date turned stalker can petition the courts over the phone free of charge to have someone’s guns confiscated, and the judge who determines if they should do it, will base it off the lowest evidentiary threshold, a preponderance, meaning there only needs to be a 51% chance the accusations are true. Preponderance only requires more evidence than counter evidence, so given that the respondent is not able to respond until after the seizure of the guns no one will ever lose on that standard.

Let’s also talk about the fear these Red Flag laws will create for gun owners, especially veterans. If we fear that reaching out for help will result in SWAT showing up at our house, those who need help will will stay silent, again only increasing suicides, instead of reducing them. We cannot stigmatize asking for help, just as we cannot stigmatize being a gun owner.

What can we do?

Gun owners are compassionate and caring, it’s often why they choose to train and carry in the first place. Because they love their communities. So we should be asking the question what can WE do? Unfortunately there are not a ton of gun owner specific suicide resources, which is unfortunate because it’s desperately needed. But if you are a firearm owner and are suicidal – or someone else in your home is suicidal – there are options. Hold My Guns is a private group who is working to partner with FFL’s and police departments to offer a place people can store firearms during a crisis. There are also multiple suicide prevention hotlines. And recently CU Anschutz unveiled an interactive map that shows out-of-home gun storage facilities for this exact reason. WTTA.org also offers non-crisis support to gun owners.

And then there are the crisis lines:

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: Call 1-800-273-8255, or chat online
Veterans Crisis Line: Call 1-800-273-8255 and press 1, text 838255, or chat online

Have other resources I should add? Drop them in comments. And please know, you can always reach out to your friends at Rally for our Rights, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We’re here for you. Contact us here.

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On Monday Feb 25th, journalist Anna Staver over at the Denver Post released an articled titled “What Colorado can learn from “red flag” gun laws in other states as lawmakers debate passing their own version”. This article discusses how the opposition and support for Colorado’s proposed “Red Flag” Emergency Risk Protection Orders (ERPO) bill varies, as well as goes into some detail about the effects of this law on other states.

The bill being considered in Colorado, HB19-1177, passed the State House Judiciary Committee last Thursday after nearly ten hours of testimony for and against it. The opposing sides continued to testify well into the night, with dozens of gun rights activists being called well after they had left. Had they all stayed, testimony undoubtedly would have continued into the early morning hours. The bill will be heard in the House Appropriations Committee this week where no public testimony will be taken, and it is expected to pass. It could see a vote of the full House Chamber as early as next week.

Proponents of this bill are arguing it as a “suicide prevention measure”, as threat to harm self is one of the reasons for firearms confiscation allowed in the bill. Never mind the chilling unintended consequences this law would have on those who are feeling suicidal – such as fear of reaching out for help, and escalating an already distressing situation. But the suicide facts Ms. Staver used in her article are wrong on their face. Here’s what her article says about suicide:

Suicide prevention

Suicide is the leading type of gun death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And supporters of Colorado’s extreme risk protection order bill claim it would prevent some of those deaths from happening in the Centennial State.

“What we are doing with this bill is giving law enforcement a tool that they need to save lives,” said Rep. Tom Sullivan, D-Centennial. “The majority of the time it’s going to be someone who is going to do harm to themselves.”

The data supports Sullivan’s assertion that if Colorado allows extreme risk protection orders, the majority of cases will involve suicidal ideation. About 80 percent of the gun seizures in Indiana and 60 percent in Connecticut arose from concerns about suicide.

But did removing those guns prevent violent self-harm?

Aaron Kivisto, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Indianapolis who studied suicide rates in both states, said the answer is yes in Indiana and no in Connecticut.

Kivisto found a 7.5 percent reduction in suicides via gun in the decade following the enactment of Indiana’s law and a 13.7 percent reduction in Connecticut in the “post-Virginia Tech period, when enforcement of the law substantially increased.”

But he found something else in Connecticut: An uptick in non-firearm suicides meant the overall suicide rate was essentially unchanged.

He said he doesn’t know why the two states got two different results, but one possible explanation is the cultural differences between them.

“Taking the gun isn’t the end of the situation. It doesn’t reduce the crisis,” Kivisto said. “It leaves someone in a crisis without a gun.”

Rally for our Rights supporter and gun rights activist, Mario Acevedo of Denver, thought the Indiana numbers didn’t seem accurate. So he did his own research. He found that not only were Ms. Staver’s numbers inaccurate, but they were wrong on the white paper she referenced.

Here’s the letter Mario sent to Ms. Staver and the Denver Post. I repeated the same research Mario had done on the CDC’s website and came up with exactly the same numbers he did. Indiana has one of the fastest increasing rates of suicide in the nation.

Anna Staver
astaver@denverpost.com

February 25, 2018

Anna,

In your article “Colorado can learn “red flag” lessons from red states,” you mentioned that professor Aaron Kivisto found that Indiana saw a 7.5 percent reduction in gun suicides following the 2005 adoption of their “red lag” gun confiscation law. That sounded off to me since Indiana is a state hit hard by the opioid epidemic and suicides are an unfortunate consequence of such drug abuse. According to the Centers for Disease Control:

In 2005, Indiana had 416 gun suicides, 745 total suicides, and 11.82 suicides per 100K population Age Adjusted Rate.

In 2017, Indiana had 604 gun suicides, 1092 total suicides, and 16.36 suicides per 100K population Age Adjusted Rate.

I don’t know what numbers or methodology Kivisto was using but his findings appear to be completely bogus. You are more than welcome to confirm my numbers at the CDC WISQARS Fatal Injury Reports.

My issue with red flag laws is that there’s a lot of hand waving over the results that cause me to question the purpose of such law. Effective policy, in this case to reduce fatal self-harm, must be based on reality and facts, not simply good intentions or wishes.

Sincerely,

Mario Acevedo
Denver, Colorado

Think they’ll bother to do the research themselves and correct this glaring inaccuracy? We really shouldn’t have to fact check the fact checkers.

Mario also contacted the author of the white paper, Aaron Kivisto. Mr. Kivisto did respond! But his response gave us a big WTF? Basically they decided the rate of suicide has decreased because it’s lower than what the projected rates were had the bill not passed. Do these people have a crystal ball?

Mr. Acevedo,

Thanks for your email. You’re absolutely right that in absolute terms suicides have increased. Our study approached the issue not in terms of absolute reductions, however, but in terms of reductions from the number of suicides that would have been expected in each state had the lot not been passed. In other words, our statistical approach utilized a technique known as the synthetic control methodology. It’s an approach developed by MIT economists to study the effects of policy changes and is currently considered among the most robust methods available to study the impact of policy change. In short, the approach provides a counterfactual – that is, an estimate of what the suicide rate would have been in Indiana had they not enacted the law, as well as in Connecticut had they not enacted the law. These estimates are compared to observed rates, and reductions represent the difference between these estimated and observed values.

The apparent contradiction you were noticing comes from the fact that suicide rates can indeed rise, but not rise at as rapid arete as would be expected. Similarly, there could be an absolute reduction in suicide rates, but a reduction not as fast as would be expected, which would be interpreted as a problematic impact.

I hope that this is helpful.

Aaron Kivisto, Ph.D., HSPP

We here at Rally for our Rights certainly don’t take suicide lightly. In fact, many of us including myself and Mario have lost loved ones to suicide. It’s an issue near and dear to our hearts. Which likely makes this even more infuriating. Suicide is a serious problem in society and manipulating stats to pass bad legislation is despicable.

Watch this testimony given by 19 year gun rights activist, Haley Marcantonio, during the Red Flag ERPO hearing last week. What she doesn’t mention in her testimony is her family has been personally touched by suicide, as many of ours have. The anti-gun community does not get a monopoly on suicide. This issue has touched millions deeply.

Tag: suicide by firearm

A Disservice To Suicidal Individuals: CO’s Red Flag ERPO Law Will Only Exacerbate A Crisis

While Promoting Red Flag Bill, Denver Post Gets Their Suicide By Firearm Facts Grossly Wrong