If you are contemplating suicide, please get help. You are so loved! You are unique and important! Everyone deserves life!
Trigger Warning: This blog contains information on suicide methodology and suicide attempts.
When Kody purchased his first shotgun, he was still living with me. The gun was stored up in his sea bag high in the rafters of the garage. He never told me when he originally purchased it. But I remember seeing the sea bag had moved on multiple occasions. I know now that the bag was moved ever so slightly each time he tried to kill himself with it.
When we talk about suicide attempts, the statistics show that the majority of people who attempt suicide are in a period of crisis. The good news is that 90% of people who attempt suicide, don’t go on to die by suicide. Kody is an outlier statistically. His attempts were numerous, continued, and happened over a sustained period of time. I don’t think any one person has any idea of how many times he attempted suicide. He shared some of these moments, but certainly not all of them.
Whether you agree with gun ownership or not, the statistics are there. A gun in a home is far more likely to end up used on a member of the household, than as protection to the home. The vast majority of cases are desperate depressive periods. As a high schooler, Kody walked in on a family member putting a shotgun to their head. That person went on to live through the depressive period. However, that image was forever a symbol of suicide in Kody’s mind.
When Kody originally researched suicide, he stayed away from guns as an option. He was looking for relatively painless options. While still living in my house, he said that those who used pills were just using them as a cry for help since these attempts were less likely to be deadly. Kody did later attempt to use pills to kill himself and survived the attempt. The issue with guns is that attempts are sudden and more likely to be deadly. It doesn’t take a significant amount of thought to go get a gun and make an attempt.
I asked Kody if he’d ever thought about purchasing a gun, when he told me about his suicidal thoughts. He told me that he hated guns and that he would not purchase one. I remember clearly a discussion we had later. There was talk of creating a law that would allow family members to voice concerns and prevent the purchase of guns by those who were suicidal. I desperately tried to find any measure that I could use to prevent Kody from purchasing that first gun. But there was no recourse for that. During this time, he purchased the gun.
During a period where Kody was feeling better, he put that gun in a safe in a family member’s house. He knew that he shouldn’t have that gun around. Several days before his death, he purchased another gun online. The timing of the order was crazy to me. At the same time he was sending me pictures of his a recent trip and sounded so happy.
I still have a lot of anger over the fact that there is so little gun control. The fact that a person can purchase a gun just a few weeks after being in a psych hospital is horrifying. It isn’t logical to allow people dealing with any type of depression to access a weapon so quickly. I know that if he hadn’t been able to purchase a gun, he’d have found a way to get the other one back. I still feel there should have been something in place to keep him from buying that second gun. During a specific period of anger, I even emailed the place he purchased the gun from in rage to tell them what they were allowing.
While it is unlikely that any additional gun control laws would have done something to help with Kody’s circumstance, I still want to make sure that people are aware that these laws need to change. Many people survive suicide attempts with other methods and go on to get the help they need. There should be laws in place that help family and medical professionals limit people’s access to guns during times of crisis so that more people are able to get help before a deadly attempt.
As long as people make arguments on gun ownership and battle people’s right to own a gun even when they don’t have a mental capacity to handle it, we will continue to see deaths like this. It is so important that we look at these statistics and realize what they mean while we are arguing for more gun control.