About guns and suicide

 This piece in the NYT is frustrating:

Clark Aposhian, chairman of a lobbying group for gun owners in Utah, where suicides outnumber homicides by a factor of eight, said he did not believe the numbers when he first heard them: “How did we not know?” Mr. Aposhian blamed the media for hiding the truth and fostering an impression that most gun deaths are murders.

There has been lots of coverage of guns-as-a-major-tool-of-suicide, though. (Those links are all examples from within the last year.) The "media" has covered murders quite a bit, yes, but there has been a lot of reporting about the gun-suicide link.

There has been a problem with gun-rights activists playing down those suicide numbers, though, for fear it will increase pressure to restrict gun sales somehow.

In counting down top-three fake news stories about guns from 2017, NRATV host Grant Stinchfield asserted that suicides by firearms shouldn't be counted as "gun deaths," even though they very clearly are deaths by gun. Fancy that.

"The final fake news of the year comes in the form of a statistic, the overused 30,000 gun deaths a year," Stinchfield said. "The left never mentions that two-thirds of those include suicides. Yet it is a number thrown around like confetti. And it’s deceptive to say the least. From The Washington Post to The New York Times, they all use it to wage war on gun ownership."

This just happened last month:

The Commander John Scott Hannon Veterans Mental Health Care Improvement Act, now awaiting the president’s signature, still does things the commander’s family says he would be proud of: funding community organizations that work with veterans, and scholarships to train more mental health professionals.

But before it was modified, the bill would also have required health care workers who treat veterans to be trained on how to talk with at-risk patients about the danger of having guns in the house and about how to reduce that risk — a strategy known as lethal-means safety.

The provision was stripped out "because the provision in question touched a third rail in Washington politics: the danger posed by firearms."

The link between the availability of guns and completed suicides isn't a secret, and hasn't been for years. There are a few people, though, who have been invested in playing down that link.