High suicide rates can result from a variety of reasons...

Hopelessness due to poverty, hopelessness due to unemployement, hopelessness due to family or school problems, and so on...it's a very large subject to discuss.

I'll quote from the Canadian Firearms Safety Course Student Handbook:

"In many cases suicide is an act of sudden impulse. It is often brought on by some temporary setback or moment of depression. These occurrences may seem trivial to the outside observer. They are not trivial to the person experiencing them. Even a failed exam, an argument with a girlfriend or boyfriend, or an accident with the family car can bring it on."

In 1995 there were 911 firearms-related suicide deaths in Canada (how about that number, eh?). They comprised 22.9% of all suicide deaths in Canada for that year. The rate has gone steadily down since 1980, when firearms accounted for 33.3% of such deaths, and it is dropping at an increasing rate.

Now...homicide in Canada. In 1995 there were 489 homicides. Compare that to the suicide rate. Eight times as many suicides as homicides!

Of the 489 homicides in Canada, 145 involved guns. That's a gun-related homicide rate of 29.7%.

Many homicides are also acts of sudden impulse, and are more easily accomplished with a gun than with a knife, a club or a fist, needless to say.

So...to wrap it up...of all the firearms-related deaths charted by Statistics Canada between 1980 and 1995...

81% were suicide
14% were homicide
5% were accidents

Kind of tells a different story from our sensationalistic press and media, doesn't it?

It appears to me that the biggest problem leading to violent death in both our societies is not violence (against others)...but despair, hopelessness, depression, and such related factors, leading to violence against oneself...which is, admittedly, often a form of indirect violence against others.

- LH