The Revenge of the Thin Blue Line 34: Suicide by Cop

 Do you know who understands Guns are metaphysical danger and a unique contributor to suicide in this Nation?  Police Unions.

Guns Save Lives?

MAP (Metropolitan Alliance of Police) Rap Sheet magazine 2023 Volume 1 has an article Protective Factors Against Suicide.  Here's a picture of the final step it recommends for its members (i.e. Cops), "firearm safe storage is critical to reducing officer suicide rates.  Studies have demonstrated that in the general population the mere presence of a firearm in the home significantly increases the risk of completed suicide." 

Understand the NRA and gun nuts have successfully divorced rational thinking about guns with the actual real world impact.  Suicide using a firearm kills 25,000 Americans a year and almost every time someone uses a gun to kill themselves they succeed.

But, gun nuts, Republicans, and Firearms Manufacturing shills like to ignore this as not "real" gun deaths because they are "suicides".  Pliant Corporate Media have gone along with this disingenuous framing separating suicides by firearms from the yearly gun violence death and mayhem and grouping it in with suicide in general as opposed to properly counting this as part of the gun culture of America.

"Gun violence,” Mark Bryant founder of Gun Violence Archive correctly notes, is still accurate when describing the damage bullets do to bodies — and families, and communities. “If you don’t think shooting yourself is gun violence, you need to take a strong hard look at the results of it,” he said. “And I’m not just talking about the splatter on the walls. I’m talking about the wives and the mothers and the children that experience the aftereffects of it. And there’s nothing not violent about that.”

But, suicide is lumped or dumped into the National Mental Health crisis which Republicans mention at every mass shooting and then studiously avoid doing anything about when the news cycle moves onto the latest Elon Musk Twitter Files dump.