of guns, but about the numbers of suicides by them.
After leaving the Small Arms Survey, I had walked back out into Geneva and followed the tramlines south, passing the quiet classical façades that line its neat streets and from there crossed the slow-pushing waters of the Rhône onto the Boulevard Georges-Favon. The sky was a peppered grey, and genteel apartments rose on each side. I carried on until I reached a place where the air was filled with the chaos of crossing cable-car wires and the roads filled with bookshops and Chinese tea merchants.
A sun-frayed shop window caught my eye; a Dungeons and Dragons store. Fantasy and comics do well here, because the Swiss seemingly enjoy such subtle distractions along with chocolates and fancy timepieces. There, in the window, a yellowing box stood: ‘Descente: Voyage dans les ténèbres’. It was a game that led you down into the shadow-lands and beyond. It seemed apt.
Around the corner, opposite a café selling bitter coffees and neatly stacked pastries, was my destination: Stop Suicide. It was a charity set up to help young people at risk. Sophie Lochet, a conscientious woman in her mid twenties, met me at the door wearing a white shirt, blue jeans and a pair of glasses that framed a kind face. She beckoned me into a room filled with reports and posters, campaign leaflets and books with depressing titles. I settled down amid offers of coffee and chocolate.
‘In Switzerland, every day, about four people will take their lives,’ she said. Over a thousand a year. ‘That’s three times more than die in road accidents.’ She explained the role that guns play in this.
Switzerland has one of the highest number of guns per household in the world. This small landlocked state, high on the west-central plains of Europe, has almost 3.5 million firearms in a population of just 8 million, leaving almost 40 per cent of Swiss households with one.17 This, she said, had led to guns being one of the leading ways of suicide among young men caught between the volatile ages of fifteen and twenty-nine.18
One reason for this, Sophie explained, was that – until recently – Swiss conscripted soldiers were allowed to keep their rifles with them after they had completed their military duties. About 40 per cent of gun suicides here were at the end of an army-issued weapon. In 2003, though, the number of Swiss soldiers was halved as a result of a sweeping army reform. This sudden decline in the armed forces meant there was a parallel decrease in the availability of guns nationwide.
This was why I had come to see Sophie. I wanted to understand if this drop in guns had resulted in fewer suicides, to see if those who say, ‘There is no correlation between gun control laws and murder or suicide rates,’ were right.19 I wanted to challenge what the pro-gun lobbyists would argue: that ‘denying one particular means to people who are motivated to commit suicide . . . simply pushes them to some other means’.20
Sophie had the answer. ‘One study did look at the gun suicide numbers before and after that reform. The academics found there was a major reduction, both in the overall suicide rate and also in the firearm suicide rate.’ The evidence, she said, was compelling. Echoing what Paul Appelbaum had told me, only 22 per cent of the reduction in firearm suicides was substituted by other ways of killing oneself. Like the coal gas situation in the UK, a drop in access to guns in Switzerland was not followed by a rise in other forms of suicide. Rather, it led to an enduring drop in the general suicide rate. Today in Switzerland there are about 200 gun suicides per year. Two decades ago it was about 400.21
Switzerland is not the only place this sort of cause and effect has been seen. I later read that in 2006 the Israeli Defence Force witnessed a disturbing number of suicides in its ranks. In an effort to bring down this number, the IDF banned soldiers from taking rifles home on the weekends. Suicides fell by 40 per cent. An army review concluded: ‘decreasing access to firearms significantly decreases rates of suicide among adolescents’.22
In Australia, too, a series of strict gun control laws in the mid 1990s led to a decrease in gun suicides, but with no significant rise in other types of suicides.23 These findings are in line with a host of studies that have found, again and again, that stricter gun laws are associated with lower gun suicide rates.24
Yet, in the US, where about 20,000 people die every year from suicide by guns, the political classes seem inured to such observations, and pro-gun advocates deny any correlation between access to guns and suicides. The lobbyists, most notably the National Rifle Association, conclude fatalistically that gun owners ‘exhibit a willingness to take definitive action when they believe it to be in their own self-interest. Such action may include ending their own life when the time is deemed appropriate.’25 They do not take into account the influence of mental illness on gun suicide.
But Sophie was convinced. Guns cause suicides. Of course, other sorrows play their part. Suicides are driven by depression, loneliness and broken hearts, but guns help transform a moment of crisis into a final act.
And yet firearm suicides somehow are still seen as inevitable and unstoppable. Or they are called something else entirely – an accident, a gun discharge. I had read that in some countries, gun suicides are under-reported by as much as 100 per cent.26 It was like that with Ernest Hemingway, a man long beset by depression. He had ‘accidentally killed himself while cleaning a gun this morning’, according to his wife.27 But we know what really happened. We know even without the New York Times pointing out that Hemingway was ‘an expert on firearms’, or that his father had taken his own life with a Civil War pistol.
Such reluctance to admit that suicide occurs, to address the things that contribute to it, such as gun availability, stems, it seemed to me, from the idea that taking your own life goes against nature and God, a view long held in Anglo-Saxon society.
‘Self-murder’ became a crime in England in the mid thirteenth century, while the term ‘to commit suicide’ reflected the Catholic Church’s view of the act as sinful. Suicide victims were once denied a Christian burial, dragged to a crossroads under the cloak of night and there thrown in a pit, a wooden stake hammered through their hearts. There were no clergy, choir or prayers. The family was even stripped of their belongings, which were given to the Crown. In this way, the suicide of an adult male once could have reduced his survivors to poverty.28
Even today, in some parts of the world, suicide is still illegal. In India, you could, until 2014, have faced up to one-year imprisonment for trying to shoot yourself. You can still be sent to prison for attempting to kill yourself in Ghana, Singapore and Uganda. Internationally, we still have a social disgust for suicide as well as an institutional refusal to respond to it. No wonder it is rarely talked about when it comes to gun control.
I thought of this as I watched the video of Paris Lane’s death once again. Half a million people might watch his death, but nothing changes. No campaign is launched, and sympathy remains muted. Such is the power of the gun and the silent powerlessness of those in despair. The gun not only transforms these people’s decision in taking their lives, but it also transforms our response to their deaths.
The comments below Paris’s video revealed this: ‘That man was weak and let his infatuation for a woman overpower his rationale,’ wrote one.
‘The hell is waiting you idiot,’ added another.
Some were just ugly: ‘If all blacks did the same America will be a safe place to live.’
But then I saw a comment that surprised me.
Someone had written: ‘They didn’t break up u fools . . . He had problems with some bad guys and they hunted him. He went home to his mom and gf to say goodbye then killed himself
