You know what that means? We have more exports! We win! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S- oh, wait.

WI Native @64:

Do you remember being a teenager[…]? Everything seems like the end of the world, they fight with their friends only to make up in a day or two, they think getting a D on a test is going to ruin their chances of college or a future of being whatever it is their dream is to be.

All of these things are true, but in very few cases do getting Ds on a test or arguing with a friend result in suicide, particularly in a kid who was supposed to have been as well-balanced as Hengel.

In ever fewer cases does it turn into a hostage situation that ends in suicide, in front of (as you put it) “a class room that included his closest friends.”

[Bart Stupak’s parents] are democrats who have a LARGE voice but instead of jumping on a gun control banwagon they focused on what caused their son to do what he did. They made their voice heard on what can cause depression. Gun control is a band aid to a larger issue.

Good for the Stupaks on addressing depression among teens. Clinical depression (and its bastard cousin, bipolar) is devastating, and amplifies the normal daily miseries of teenaged life to the point where they can literally seem unbearable. In some ways bipolar is even worse, since you have the relative highs to contrast with your down phases, making them seem much darker.*

Anything that can help increase awareness of these conditions is a positive step.

However, the report states clearly (as you noted) that there was no evidence whatsoever that anything was wrong with Hengel. A brief bout of the blues is not – let me make this absolutely clear – not the same as clinical, diagnosable, treatable depression.

True depression does not just switch on. You don’t go from feeling fine over the weekend to, literally, becoming a hostage-taker the very next day. Whatever Hengel might have been suffering from, I believe clinical depression wasn’t it. There would have been signs, such as withdrawal from friends and community, slipping grades, and a host of minor behavioral changes that everyone who knew him would be remembering now.

Similarly, bipolar isn’t a likely cause here either – while you can switch from up to down in half a day or less, there are still lots of signs that people close to him would have noticed (particularly in retrospect) such as high-energy fugues that may have included going days with little or no sleep, speed-talking, etc., followed by episodes of such intense darkness that the kid couldn’t even be dragged out of bed, let alone made it to school with a bagful of weaponry.

Your suggestion that gun control is a “band-aid” may or may not be correct. However, Greg does have a very good point: Had firearms not been accessible to Hengel, he would not have been able to take hostages at gunpoint, nor shoot himself. That is indisputable.

More woman commit suicide by over dosing on pills, and there are laws to prevent people from buying certain drugs over the counter but yet woman still find these drugs.

I don’t know what the stats are on how women commit suicide, but working from the presumption that your claim is correct, you’re still overlooking something important. Those meds have been (ostensibly) formulated and prescribed to treat medical conditions. Firearms have not, and never have been.

I own a few pistols (or toys, as Greg calls them when he wants to tweak me a bit), and I know as well as anyone else that firearms are made expressly and entirely for the purpose of killing. It might be a deer, an elk, a duck, or a human, but there is no firearm anywhere that is made with the idea in mind of, say, painting a house. Yet while we seek to keep medicines out of the hands of those for whom they have not been prescribed, there is a vocal element of US culture that insistes guns should be freely available to everyone.

Equating suicide by firearm to suicide by medicine is a false equivalency.

While reducing their availability to the general public will not eradicate all suicide deaths by firearms, taking steps to make them harder to get for young people will almost certainly have an effect on suicide statistics. (As well as accidental death and murder.)

And, just to be infuriatingly pedantic, the plural of “woman” is “women”.

==

* This is the voice of experience.

It isn’t unusual. But this exact scenario has not happened as far as I know and it points out an interesting flaw in security. In this case, there was only talking going on for a an hour or two. What if something else was going on for an hour or two and no one was aware? Just food for thought, really.

I remember being a teenager. My daughter is a teenager. Your imply in your second paragraph that I’m denigrating the young man here, but I have not and am not. Your attitude and accusation is inappropriate and obnoxious, and causes me to question your sincerity or intelligence.

I agree that core issues of depression and so on need to be dealt with. But the relevant data and science shows us that if, hypothetically, guns did not exist a very large percentage of the children who kill themselves would not have. Gun control (in this case, insisting that guns be better locked up, mainly) is not a band aid, and to say so is a terrible insult to the families of all those good kids who took their own lives so easily because daddy’s precious toy was left accessible to them.

How dare you.

t until you have experienced something similar, you could never know if you would blame the gun or that circumstances.

How terribly obnoxious, and wrong, of you to assume that I have not experienced tragedy related to teen suicide.

May God forgive him of his sins.

You would do well to pay more attention to the world in which you actually live rather than the made up magic man in the sky world that deludes you. At the very least, it might improve your reading comprehension because you would actually read things rather than assume, incorrectly, what people have said.

It also concerns me that your IP address is from Colorado, not Wisconsin.

That said, I live in Canada, where guns are relatively controlled, yet my grandmother hunts deer every season. Only in Toronto where illegal guns have made their way into gang hands from south of the border is gun violence a real problem.

Well … it was kinda the topic of the post because this kid kinda committed suicide with a gun and stuff.

You know what? You’re right. I feel a bit foolish now to have obsessed on that point, when as you say the entire dadblang article was on that very topic.

I’m thinking of safer safety mechanisms, and better training and antistupidity measures.

Well, you know what they say about making something foolproof. Though the point about Fisher-Price is something to consider. If they can make a toy helicopter tamper-resistant, why not guns? Maybe FP should design the safety mechanisms.

We’ve had this discussion before. Your equivalence of firearms with toys is invalid.

Iz not.

Iz too. :p

I totally consider you to be an ally. Please don’t make up an argument about how I’m not doing that right as a place to hid when you are wrong! (On some points)

I appreciate that. I’ll have to do a little insight work to see what it was about the discussion that got me so clenched up. It genuinely was blind of me to overlook the obvious here.

Well … it was kinda the topic of the post because this kid kinda committed suicide with a gun and stuff.

I’m not sure how. In both cases, the firearms were under legal ownership. In the first instance the rifle was in the possession of a putatively-responsible adult. In what way would strong gun control have saved that little girl’s life? Or were you thinking instead of a more effective safety mechanism in that specific case?

I’m thinking of safer safety mechanisms, and better training and antistupidity measures.

OK, I’m sitting here with this little red, blue, green and white helicopter. If you put a ball through the hole in the top it plays a song. Different balls play different songs. So, naturally, I needed to figure out how to make the thing play the song without the balls, by tripping the mechanisms with my fingers.

When I do that, nine out of ten times the helicopter goes “BOING” … which is a noise it never makes. Obviously, crazy people at Fisher Price figured that I (and others) would try to outsmart the mechanism, so they put in the “BOING” sound that only activates when unnatural things happen to the toy.

If they can do that they can make a firearm that won’t dicharge while you are cleaning it. The only reason there is not one now is because a) no one has required it and b) any effort to even THINK about increased safety in the mechanisms is seen as an attack on gun ownership and vigorously opposed by gun nuts.

We’ve had this discussion before. Your equivalence of firearms with toys is invalid.

Iz not.

Yet, again, instead of attempting to enlist me as an ally, you seem to want to bully me away.

I totally consider you to be an ally. Please don’t make up an argument about how I’m not doing that right as a place to hid when you are wrong! (On some points)

Seriously, this is a thread about a kid who committed suicide with a gun. You are telling me that I’m being a scoundrel because I keep coming back to the problem of kids committing suicide with guns. Is it really me who is not trying to make our relationship work?