Guns don't kill people,

[The Hen]

Ferfucksake. I wouldn't have thought that a drop in suicides from firearms would be such a debating issue.

Yay to Australia. Yay to the gun buy back.

Fucking go us!

[dales]

Hen:

Let us say one does NOT want to "sell" their .45 pistol or 30.06 rifle to the government.

What then?

Confiscation?

[loCAtek]

My point was that in previous gun threads the anti stance made claims that removing access to firearms would reduce the amount of suicides. The counter argument was that the suicidal would simply use other means. Granted the data is still coming in, but hanging seems to be gaining in popularity down there.

Juss' sayin'

[Gob]

Hen:

Let us say one does NOT want to "sell" their .45 pistol or 30.06 rifle to the government.

What then?

Confiscation?

It was a voluntary mate.

[Scooter]

Professor Mendoza, who [was] chairman of the Federal Government's National Advisory Council on Mental Health, states the statistics were accurate up to 2004

He doesn't say any such thing. He is talking about statistics on spending for mental health.

Ferfucksake. I wouldn't have thought that a drop in suicides from firearms would be such a debating issue.

Indeed. Apparently some people think it is such a terrible thing that firearms suicides are dropping that they feel compelled to deny it.

[loCAtek]

Not so. Just that they are resorting to other methods as predicted, in the absence of firearms.

Guns don't kill people; people kill themselves.

[Scooter]

Not so. Just that they are resorting to other methods as predicted, in the absence of firearms.

That is what is being alleged, without success. Because some are unwilling to admit the obvious.

[Lord Jim]

Here's a thought....

Maybe the results were as pronounced as they seem to have been, because a disproportionate number of folks, (versus the overall gun owning community) who voluntarily turned in their guns knew they were suffering from psychological problems (like depression) and they were happy to get rid of them to remove the temptation....

If so that's great...

I have no quarrel with people who want to voluntarily give up their guns...

I also have no quarrel with people who want to voluntarily give up their bicycles, their speedos, (in fact in many cases, I would encourage that) their waffle irons or their feather boas...(you're not getting mine.)

The operative word in all of these instances being....

"voluntarily"....

There's nothing wrong with this program, so far as it goes....

The danger of course lies with the possibility that the bureaucratic social engineers will start to think, "Well gee whiz, look at all the lives we saved with a voluntary program. Just imagine how many we could save if we made it mandatory..."

But so long as one remains aware of, and vigilant against, that potential, (I've never been a big believer in the inevitability of "slippery slopes"..."slopes" are only "slippery" if you're oblivious to them. "A" does not necessarily lead automatically to "B")

There's certainly nothing wrong with people who don't feel they should have guns giving them up voluntarily...

In fact if a person who doesn't feel they should have a gun has one, they should probably be encouraged to voluntarily give it up.

[Scooter]

This was a mandatory program, AFAIK. Certain classes of previously legal guns were outlawed.

Nevertheless I essentially agree with your analysis. Vinne the Hood would have been unlikely to surrender his gun, which was probably acquired illegally in the first place. The most likely to surrender their guns would be otherwise law abiding homeowners. It is these guns that are more likely than Vinnie the Hood's to have been used in suicides because they happened to be lying about the house somewhere, ready to be picked up by someone in a suicidal despair (or by his/her child to pull a Columbine).

But so what? Unless the Vinnie the Hoods of Australia decided to take advantage of the fact that otherwise law abiding homeowners had surrendered these guns and replaced them with less powerful ones, or not at all, and went around murdering them in their beds in numbers equal to or greater than the reduction in suicides, then lives were saved. It worked. Period.

[loCAtek]

Negative, suicide by firearm was down, while suicide by other means was up.

Find the data that says suicide in general, was reduced after this measure.

[Gob]

SUICIDE, TOTAL NUMBER OF DEATHS



METHOD OF SUICIDE

In 2005 the most frequent method of suicide was hanging (including strangulation and suffocation) which was used in half (51%) of all suicide deaths. Poisoning by drugs was used in 12% and poisoning by other methods (including by motor vehicle exhaust) was used in 16% of suicide deaths. Methods using firearms accounted for 7% of suicide deaths. The remaining group (Other) comprised 14% of suicide deaths and included deaths from drowning, jumping from a high place, and other methods. Suicide deaths using firearms have more than halved over the last ten years, from 389 deaths in 1995, to 147 deaths in 2005. See Table 5 for data on broad groupings of method of suicide.

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/mf/3309.0/

[Gob]

Australian suicide rates falling, report says
Posted Tue Jul 28, 2009 12:03pm AEST


Australia's suicide rate seems to be falling, according to a new report from the Institute of Health and Welfare.

Suicide is often a social taboo so getting reliable data on suicide rates has been historically difficult and institute says suicides are traditionally under-reported.

But in its new study released today, the institute suggests suicide rates have dramatically fallen in the past decade.

There were more than 2,700 deaths in 1997, falling by a third to 1,800 in 2006.

The biggest reductions were in the younger age groups, with suicide deaths in the 25- to 34-year-old category falling by more than half.

But by contrast, there were marginally more suicide deaths in the 55- to 64-year-old group over the 10-year period.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009 ... 638611.htm

[loCAtek]

Gob, your source is only accurate up to 2005, which has already been disputed as gray area of number-crunching;

Professor Mendoza, who [was] chairman of the Federal Government's National Advisory Council on Mental Health, states the statistics were accurate up to 2004;

Suicides: Recent Trends, Australia, 1993 to 2003 [by State or Territory]


Since then, Australian Government has been involved in number crunching;

KERRY O'BRIEN: Just tell me what are the glaring areas of mental health neglect in your experience that are demanding a higher priority than this government is giving?

JOHN MENDOZA: Well, let's take the two first of all that the Government has actually recognised in its response in the federal Budget, the most recent federal Budget. It announced with a great deal of fanfare the investment in expanding the Headspace youth mental health initiative. That was an initiative in fact begun by the Howard Government in 2004.

...

KERRY O'BRIEN: Well, Nicola Roxon said today with regard to your claims that spending on mental health programs will nearly double over the current four years. That doesn't impress you?

JOHN MENDOZA: This is a convenient sample, you might say, Kerry. What they've done is some funny numbers here. They've taken four years of funding; the first two years - sorry, the two years prior to the 2006 COAG commitment on mental health and the very first two years of that commitment which were the lower spending as the program started to ramp up. They've taken that convenient four years and they've compared it to the last three years of the Howard Government COAG plan and one further year and said, "Well there's the evidence. We've doubled the expenditure." But that expenditure was always seen by John Howard, Morris Iemma and the other premiers and chief ministers at the time as the first step towards reform, as the first payment. And the Senate report in 2006 made it abundantly clear that we needed to continue to scale up this investment if we had any chance of actually stemming the flow of people to acute care units, the revolving door problem that's so well-described, the problems we have with about two-thirds of our prison population's being people with mental health problems, two thirds of our street people, our homeless people with mental health problems. If we're gonna tackle those problems, we're not gonna solve it in one term of Parliament, but we do need a clear commitment, a strategic approach, to resolving the crisis and we have not seen anything in the announcements of the Rudd Government to date that are going to address those needs.


Kerry O'Brien speaks with John Mendoza following his resignation as chair of the Federal Government's National Advisory Council on Mental Health.

[Scooter]

Once again, that quote refers to how funding for mental health services has been reported. If you are not even going to bother to read what other people post, at least read what you are copying/pasting before purporting it to say something it doesn't.

The data Gob has presented shows that suicides overall fell for many years following the firearms ban. That the numbers have been alleged by some to be underreported is irrelevant; if they were underreported, then they were being underreported before the ban as well, barring some bizarre change in methodology of which no one, as yet, has presented even a hint.

That suicides might have begun to climb again (once again, alleged without evidence) due to a recession which never hit Australia is also irrelevant. Those alleged addtional suicides (if they even occurred) would have simply added to a higher baseline of suicides had the ban not been enacted.

Have we dealt with all of your misapprehensions, red herrings, and assertions presented without evidence? Can we move on to something new now? Otherwise I'm happy to go round the merry-go-round again. And again.

[Andrew D]

If suicides by firearms accounted for only 7% of all suicides, doesn't there have to be some much more significant factor (or set of factors) than a reduction in the number of firearms to explain the overall suicide rate's "falling by a third"?

[dales]

Mass infusion of anti-depressants in the water supply.

[Lord Jim]

If suicides by firearms accounted for only 7% of all suicides, doesn't there have to be some much more significant factor (or set of factors) than a reduction in the number of firearms to explain the overall suicide rate's "falling by a third"?

that would seem obvious...