It was Sunday morning, Mother's Day. In Washington, D.C., the Clintons were welcoming Million Mom Marchers at the White House before their rally, while near the Washington Monument, the Second Amendment Sisters were beginning to assemble. But in North Michigan, in the town of Menominee near the Wisconsin border, it was also the morning after the local high school's prom, and B.J. Stupak, son of the four-term Democratic Congressman Bart Stupak, had been found dead in his home. The apparently thriving high school junior -- recently elected president of the student council and named to prom court -- had shot himself.
As Capitol Hill mourned the tragic death of Stupak's son, Republican Congresswoman Mary Bono decided something had to be done. She sent an open letter to the National Rifle Association's Wayne LaPierre, encouraging the group "to inform parents, teens and all gun owners of the potentially dangerous connection between the access to a gun and suicide." In B.J.'s case, the connection was lethal: According to police reports, the gun he used belonged to a family member.
There was painful irony to B.J. Stupak's death, in that his father is a member of the most visible organization promoting gun ownership; Stupak is one of Congress's few "NRA Democrats." A former police officer and state trooper, last year Bart Stupak said in an interview, "I'm a member of the NRA, my wife's a member of the NRA, our sons are members of the NRA."
Mary Bono's chief of staff Frank Cullen insists that "in no way was Congresswoman Bono attempting to characterize the incident" of B.J.'s death, or to speak for the Stupak family. Whatever the case, it was a rare, and slightly edgy moment: a Republican mother goading the NRA, while a Democratic father swallowed his grief.
The Crisis
Since the shootings at Columbine high school in April of 1999, stories of kids murdering kids have dominated gun control debates. But B.J. Stupak's death draws attention to an astonishing, but rarely cited figure: In any given year, more than half of all U.S. gun-related deaths are not homicides at all, but suicides.
According to some, this little known fact could help reshape the gun issue. Today, the NRA insists that the only way for responsible Americans to protect their families from criminals is to own a gun -- and countless families have acted on that warning. But what the organization fails to tell its members and others is that in most gun deaths, the shooter is also the victim.
"If you really want to understand the issue of benefits and costs of firearms, you have to know what's happening with suicides," says David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. What's happening is this: Suicide is the eighth leading cause of death in the U.S., and more Americans commit suicide using guns than with all other means combined. On average, 50 people kill themselves with guns every day.
In 1997, there were almost 18,000 gun suicides, compared to roughly 13,000 gun homicides. (This is the last year for which statistics are currently available.) In some states, the gun suicide to homicide ratio is actually far higher: In Colorado, for example, it is three to one.
Guns are also the most deadly weapon used in suicide attempts; guns kill more than nine out of 10 people who attempt suicide with them, according to one study. Since many suicide attempts are the result of impulsive behavior, this means access to a gun can easily turn a passing bout of depression into a tragedy. "If they didn't have [a gun] handy, they might try suicide by other means, but they'd be more likely to survive and get counseling," says Kristen Rand, federal affairs director at the Violence Policy Center.
But perhaps most significantly -- and as Mary Bono's letter to the NRA pointed out -- there appears to be a connection between gun availibility and risk of suicide, especially among youth. A number of studies, including several in the New England Journal of Medicine, have confirmed this link. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), "people living in households in which guns are kept have a risk of suicide that is five times greater than people living in households without guns."
Government's Silence
Despite these horrifying statistics, those in the federal government have only recently begun to talk about suicide -- and they have almost completely ignored the gun connection. Indeed, although Senators Edward Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Pete Domenici, a Republican from New Mexico, have proposed legislation to devote $75 million for suicide prevention, their bill never mentions guns, instead focusing on mental health.
Last February, a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee held the first congressional hearing on suicide prevention. Surgeon General David Satcher was a witness at the hearing; last year, Satcher declared suicide a serious public health threat and made it a top priority -- becoming the first surgeon general ever to do so.
At the Senate's February suicide hearings, however, guns were barely mentioned. And indeed, the Surgeon General's groundbreaking suicide report has been taken to task by the Bell Campaign, a gun violence prevention group, for virtually ignoring gun suicide. "How does a major national health report overlook the cause of 17,700 deaths?" asks a release put out by the organization. The release adds, "Surely Surgeon General David Satcher understands the need to address guns as part of any meaningful plan to prevent suicide. But, like his predecessors, the Surgeon General must go to Congress for research funding. And, as we all know, Congress answers to the National Rifle Association."
The Campaign is right to implicate the NRA. Responding to those who charge that gun availability increases the chance of suicide, the NRA's Paul Blackman told The Los Angeles Times, "if a person is determined to kill himself, he will find a way." Not so, say some. As Emory University public health researcher Arthur Kellerman has written, "gun industry claims about the value of handguns for home defense are reminiscent of the early days of tobacco advertising, when cigarette companies extolled the health benefits of smoking."
In fact, the NRA is so determined to promote its viewpoint that it has found a way to quiet those who would publicize the facts that contradict it. (The organization did not return calls for this article.) The NRA successfully pressured Congress to cut funding for the Centers for Disease Control's effort to understand the public health effects of guns.
(See accompanying story.)
Gun control advocacy groups and suicide prevention organizations have been as uncoordinated as the NRA has been powerful. Some suicide prevention groups don't even take gun control positions, like the Colorado-based Yellow Ribbon Foundation. Though the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the American Association of Suicidology take strong stances, the latter's executive director, Dr. Alan Berman, nevertheless calls suicide "the invisible kid sister" in the gun debate.
Few Solutions
The result of this invisibility is that few have studied what kind of measures would specifically help reduce gun suicide. But some point to popular gun control proposals that could impact suicide levels -- at least indirectly. Since many children and teenagers commit suicide with their parents' guns, experts say child trigger locks and smart gun technology (which would only allow a gun's owner to shoot it) would probably help prevent youth suicides. Likewise with President Clinton's proposed safe storage law holding parents responsible for making loaded, unlocked guns available to children. On the other hand, the elderly are a high-risk group for suicide -- and a group for whom many such measures would be less effective.
A few suggest a more controversial approach: expanding background checks for gun purchases to include mental health records. After all, more than 90 percent of suicides are connected to some type of mental or substance abuse disorder.
At present, federal law prohibits those who have been involuntarily committed to mental institutions from buying handguns. But law enforcement agencies do not have access to mental health records in most states, which means background checks frequently fail to prevent the mentally ill from buying guns. And that doesn't even begin to address those who have voluntarily entered mental institutions, or are simply receiving outpatient treatment. For these cases, many consider it crucial that at the very least, mental health professionals discuss the dangers of firearms with patients and their families.
Any discussion of using mental health records to prohibit people from buying guns raises a strong conflict, however. On the one hand, those concerned with suicide want to keep guns out of the hands of anyone who might consider it. On the other hand, some perceive such restrictions as unfair -- and worry that expanding access to mental health records could violate patients' privacy.
The lack of proposals specifically designed to cut down on gun suicide only highlights the dearth of attention that the political and activist community has given the issue. Activists have treated suicide as a mental health issue only -- excluding discussions of gun control to reduce suicide. And the NRA has ensured that the gun debate is centered on the criminal justice issue only -- excluding discussions of gun control to reduce suicide.
But facts show that the debate must change. If stories like B.J. Stupak's begin to turn the debate toward the epidemic of gun suicide, perhaps the NRA will have to admit that a gun in the home is rarely a source of protection -- and often leads to tragedy.