The makeshift memorial of flowers, balloons, notes and photos grows and grows. It is a ritual we’ve learned, like bowing our heads to pray. On the news, a man says he came to add flowers, to see it, because it shows that we are good people. Tears come to my eyes. But our numbers tell another story.
- Total 2020 U.S. gun violence deaths: 43,540
- The number of those that were homicides, murder: 19,384
- Total 2020 mass shooting deaths: 446
- The number that were suicides: 24,156
Suicides are over half of gun deaths every year. These figures were similar in 2019 and 2018. U.S. suicides have increased steadily in recent decades.
Rural Colorado
We have more gun crime than any other wealthy country. We have more guns. Places with more guns have more gun deaths. Living in a house with a gun increases your odds of dying. Over 80% of gun suicides by children 18 or younger involve a gun belonging to a family member. The U.S. has ten times the gun suicide rate for children as other countries.
For days following Colorado’s latest mass shooting, it was the lead story on the news. These were innocent, good people, just buying groceries. The news tells each of their stories, these people who were so randomly and abruptly taken away. I cry, watching them.
Suicide was our 10th leading cause of death until 2020, when Covid slotted in at third place behind heart disease and cancer. Covid bumped suicide down to eleventh place, even though the numbers stayed about the same.
Some countries have higher gun death rates than we do, like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, whose people now swarm our border to escape such fates. Compared to them, we look good. Compared to Canada and the UK, we look awful. In the Middle East, only Iraq has a higher gun death rate than ours.
Who kills themselves? Men and boys, mostly. Rural residents, veterans, LGBTQ adults and youth are all more likely to kill themselves. For the 10 – 34 age group, suicide was the second leading cause of death, after accidents.
Colorado’s rural areas have more guns and higher suicide rates. We have less access to mental health care than many states and least access in rural areas. In 2019 we had the highest increase in teen suicide in the U.S., mostly white and male. In Colorado, suicide was the leading cause of death for the 10 – 24 age group.
My husband and I ran an errand, found Colfax closed near the Cathedral. They were holding a funeral mass for Eric Talley, one of the first police officers to enter the Boulder King Sooper’s. Inside that spectacular sanctuary, they would be repeating the rosary: pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. I blinked back tears.
“Nationally, Colorado has the third highest prevalence of mental illness among adults, according to the most recent annual report by Mental Health America. That report, based on data from 2017 and 2018, also finds Colorado has the nation’s highest percentage of adults with substance abuse disorder and the third-highest percentage of adults considering suicide. Colorado’s suicide rate hit nearly 22 per 100,000 in 2018 compared to an average of 14 per 100,000 people nationally.”
—from “On The Edge,” Tina Griego and Susan Greene’s 2020 COLab report on the effects of Covid on mental health issues, involving over 100 newsrooms around the state
U.S. suicides declined slightly in 2020. Studies of other natural disasters suggest there’s a “honeymoon period” in which people pull together, have an increased sense of community. Because of “Boulder Strong,” suicides may level off. Money pours into a fund for the victims’ families. The makeshift memorial grows. We gain a sense of belonging, a reaffirmation that, yes, we are good people. But if the studies are right, our suicide rates will rebound as that honeymoon effect wears off, as urgency leaves the headlines.
With the King Sooper’s shooting, we have already forgotten the Asian women in Atlanta. Mass shootings splash our headlines and are gone, like receding tides. Suicides don’t get even that. Mental health occasionally garners attention, in reports like Griego and Greene’s.
It is not easy to embrace those with dark clouds in their heads, I know. My youngest brother couldn’t stop the voices coming out of light fixtures, couldn’t stay on his meds, was in most ways a gentle, sensitive person, and died by gun at 31. That was thirty-five years ago, but more than King Sooper’s or the Aurora theatre or Columbine, remembering his shotgun death sometimes still makes me cry. All who are personally touched by a violent death are susceptible to crying about it thirty-five years later.
Every day, 65 Americans kill themselves with guns. We know what it takes to slow this down. Reducing access to guns. Better funding for mental health care. And extending that “community strong” connection to those who don’t make the news, those who constitute the majority of our gun deaths, those who need our support most of all.
Much information in this piece came from:
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
A sobering read, yes. But a necessary one. We need to keep reading and learning until we get it. Thank you for saying what needs to be said.
Thank you, Kathleen.
Such a national shame that we can’t address these issues with the urgency that is needed. Guns are weapons of destruction: for killing deer for food, predators to protect our property or other humans in war since the beginning of time. Some people in distress—their minds overpowered by emotions they cannot control or thoughts they cannot quiet—project their confusion and anger onto the world that threatens, the world that will not listen, and take the gun to eliminate the other. Or themselves.
For those of us secure in our solid minds, our certainties, our comforts, it is too much to reach out. We are unconcerned when the eruption doesn’t touch us. We can’t or won’t look at the larger picture of what it means to our community, our society. The world is too big. But next door, or down the street, someone is suffering inside, and from what they’ve seen around them, they reach for a gun. It is never a solution, but it is a symbol of power. The power of death, of being able to end the confusion and anger that makes life Hell.
Thanks, Pat, for your grim but important reminder of how far we have to go to heal ourselves, fix these entrenched problems. Unfortunately, I’m not too shocked by Colorado’s statistics on guns but the health care related numbers caught me by surprise. Yet another casualty of Tabor? It’s all really shameful and we’ve got to break through this state of affairs!
Pat, as usual and as you do so well, you capture the sweep of an enormous and confounding reality with a precise and specific eye. I’m so sorry that this topic is personal, that it is timely, that it never seems to stop being timely.
May we do better at doing what it takes.
Thank you Pat for keeping us in tune with the present moment as we try to digest the indigestible.
Sobering, and tragic. Thanks as always for your clear voice.