It looks like that’s PolySeSouvient quoting a Toronto Star opinion piece on suicide, so I guess they’re comparing suicidal people as somehow being a danger to society, the author is apparently an ER physician and is co-chair of public affairs for the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians. Naturally an ER physician from Toronto is going to be seeing more gunshot wounds at work than one from Moose Jaw.
While the piece claims that firearms suicides have higher success rates than poisoning or wrist slashing, it noticeably omitted hanging from the comparison.
That he notes suicides are practically never reported in the media is because the media has a policy of not reporting on people killing themselves unless there’s some extraneous circumstance that makes it impossible to conceal.
The opinion also misses the fact that the very first option when calling the Canadian Firearms Centre is essentially a red flag reporting selection, it’s option #1 and this author claims that there is no ‘red flag’ law. Call any police dept in Canada with a mental health concern about a person who owns firearms and that person will be getting an unpleasant visit from LE regardless of whether the report had any merit or not. This twit claims there’s no ‘red flag’ laws here.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...-suicides.html
“ This is National Suicide Prevention Week and Canada is engaged in a national election.
The public’s increasing concern about the rise in gun crime in our urban areas and the need for improved gun control will undoubtedly be debated by the various political parties.
Having closely followed the issue for close to three decades, I have always found it curious that when politicians talk about gun control they totally ignore the cause of the greatest number of firearm deaths – suicide.
Canada has one of the highest rates of suicides by firearms in the developed world. Seventy-five per cent of firearm deaths in Canada are due to suicide and that equates to more than 500 Canadians who die every year as a result of gun suicide.
The proportion of completed suicides is highest with a firearm. Guns are a particularly lethal method of suicide with a lethality rate of over 90 per cent. Suicide attempts by guns are usually successful, whereas attempts by other means (e.g., drugs, cutting) are much less so.
Provinces with higher rates of gun ownership generally tend to have higher rates of gun suicide and where hunting is a sport and firearms are more readily available the firearm suicide is higher than in urban areas. A home where a firearm is kept is five times more likely to be the scene of a suicide than a home without a gun.
The reality is that most gun deaths in Canada are not a result of urban gangs with smuggled handguns but farmers and hunters with perfectly legal shotguns and rifles.
These are practically never reported in the media.
Study after study has shown that access to firearms increases the risk of suicide and that a reduction in access to firearms reduces both the risk of suicide by firearm and overall suicide rate.
It is thus probably time that we frame the issue of gun control not as strictly crime control but in its proper place as a public health and suicide prevention issue.
Keeping weapons out of the hands of the severely mentally ill will save lives.
Suicide is often impulsive, the decision made to pull the trigger between minutes and one hour.
Many suicidal crises are temporary. Most people, who attempt suicide never repeat it. More than 90 per cent of people who survive a suicide attempt do not go on to die by suicide.
Temporarily removing the guns from a home of a potentially suicidal patient will save valuable Canadian lives.
In the various debates surrounding Canada’s latest incarnation of gun control – Bill C-71 – the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians repeatedly called for a new approach to gun control.
We have asked for improved research into firearm injury and death in Canada, a more concerted effort into teaching health professionals to engage with their patients about firearms ownership, a more aggressive approach to ensuring safe storage practices and lastly, a mandated responsibility for physicians to report individuals at risk of firearm death.
In the United States there is currently an extensive debate and indeed the passing of so-called “Red Flag” laws to prevent suicides and mass shootings.
If a person with access to firearms is deemed to be capable of perpetrating a violent act upon himself or others, then the state has the right to temporarily confiscate their guns until such time as their depression or psychosis has been treated and their mental health crisis has passed.
In Canada, we report unsafe drivers and pilots, certain infectious diseases and perpetrators of child abuse. We cannot report those with a serious mental illness and a gun, unless they directly threaten harm to another or are deemed an immediate threat to suicide.
The public can report an unsafe individual to a chief firearms officer, but it is unclear how often this is actually done and in the immediacy of the physician-patient encounter is impractical.
If we are going to reduce the number of firearm deaths in Canada, we need a renewed focus on firearm suicides, and we need to consider Red Flag laws.
In Canada, this is where the debate should be.”
More Nonsense From The Anti Firearms Lobby
something stinks, smells like troll
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