The clear change that should be suggested is more proactive identification of mental illness and increased guaranteed access to mental health services. If that reads to you as nothing but "thoughts and prayers", I don't know what to say.
https://www.sprc.org/means-suicide
It turns out more willpower/commitment is needed to jump off a bridge than pull a trigger. The same with stabbing or suffocating yourself. Yes, someone with lots of willpower/commitment will work around it, but for those just teetering on the edge guns are very very effective.
Also, you know what takes even less willpower than passing a background check (or stealing/borrowing/buying a gun + ammo from someone else illegally), paying hundreds of dollars for a gun + ammo, pointing it at the right spot on one's own head (to actually die instead of just maiming oneself) and pulling the trigger? Buying $20 worth of over-the-counter painkillers and chugging the bottle, or buying a $10 bottle of hard liquor and chugging that (with or without the painkillers), or running a $5 tube from the exhaust of a running car to the interior and taking a nap.
And on that note, firearms are only more popular than other means of suicide among males; per your source, females typically prefer poisoning (though firearms are almost tied). Both males and females have an equally-high tendency (around 25%) to commit suicide via suffocation (and for females under 24, that skyrockets to almost an absolute majority). A "perfect" world where firearms don't exist won't make those go away, and the people who'd kill themselves with guns would almost certainly gravitate toward other means (as the multitude of suicidal young people without firearms access already tend to do).
(Additionally: your source doesn't seem to specify whether or not those numbers are for actual deaths or attempts; lots of people survive their suicide attempts, whether because they didn't use an effective method or because someone intervened. It'd be interesting to see that distinction; I suspect the graphs are only recording actual deaths, which means that firearms are going to be skewed because they're more effective at actually ensuring death, while poisoning and suffocation might be far more popular but less effective.)
Getting enough pills to do yourself in without a prescription is super hard and not very reliable. Most OTC drugs will cause you to vomit long before you die. Anyways, this is the route my terminally ill mom took with a doctor’s help, the best way to do it anyways. (I only knew two people who committed suicide, the other one was a girl who shot herself in the head in high school)
Surviving a suicide by gun is kind of gruesome, it isn’t something I want to think about.
There are plenty of great reasons to restrict firearms, making suicide more difficult is just one of them. Honestly, it’s only something you have to worry about if you have guns in the house in the first place (the girls’ dad was the heavily pro gun type, so she had easy access), so it’s easy to opt out of that problem for us anti gun types (unlike say mass school shootings).
It's actually ridiculously easy in the US, especially when combined with alcohol (probably easier than illicitly obtaining a gun, given that far more Americans have pills laying around than guns). Reliability is another story (but - again - increases with alcohol). This also assumes that even kids (let alone adults) don't have access to prescriptions (which would be a poor assumption, given the ongoing opiate addiction crisis and American doctors' tendencies to write morphine et. al. prescriptions up the wazoo, as well as the fact that sometimes kids get sick, too).
And that ain't even mentioning illegal drugs; heroin and methamphetamines are pretty commonplace in the US, as are accidental overdoses (and given that suicides do tend to be spur of the moment, it's possible - probable, even - that suicide by illegal narcotics - be they illegally-obtained prescription drugs or hard recreational drugs - goes substantially unreported and instead lumped in with accidental overdoses).
Here's an idea that doesn't infringe on any rights: Mandate each handgun sale come with a free suicide prevention pamphlet. That would definitely lower suicide rates measurably at a low cost that everyone can agree on.
The evidence says otherwise. Most suicidal ideation is brief and impulsive, so making it harder to access effective means of suicide doesn't just lead to a substitution. Multiple studies have found a lasting reduction in the overall suicide rate after a highly lethal means of suicide became less easily available.
The majority of people who survive a suicide attempt say that they decided to attempt suicide less than an hour beforehand; simply increasing the delay between impulse and action can be life-saving.
90% of people who attempt suicide do not go on to make a further attempt, so merely inducing people to choose a less lethal method is a net win.
Even still, there are other ways of increasing suicide friction than outright bans. Firearm waiting periods (to prevent same-day purchase suicides) would increase friction, suicide pamphlets with every sale would increase friction, etc
- When Sri Lanka replaced a common pesticide which made it easy for farmers to commit suicide with another one that was not as toxic to humans, suicide rates fell by half: [1]
- Many different bridges which were popular suicide sites installed bridges and found that overall suicides decreased and did not relocate to nearby bridges without nets. Here is one example from Montreal, there are many others: [2]
It is very well-established in the literature that eliminating easy means to suicide does reduce total suicides and causes only a minor a displacement effect to other methods. Your obstinance on this fact is only making you look like a flat-earther.
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC478945/
- The coal gas phaseout's associated decrease in suicide rates principally affected men; women more readily jumped to other alternatives (as indicated on the graphs). It also principally affected England and Wales (Scotland showed far more modest decreases in suicide among men, and effectively no change among women), which prompted the authors of that paper to exclude Scotland from their conclusions due to the anomalous data; it's possible that Scotland didn't phase out coal gas as quickly, but the drop in suicide-by-CO-suffocation seems to support the idea that Scotland and England/Wales were under the same conditions.
- Per the chart in the Sri Lanka article that breaks down poisoning v. "other specified methods" v. "other means", poisoning actually increased (even ignoring the spike in 1983), and most of the reductions were in the "other means" category (which was completely eliminated by 2005). The "Data for risk factors in suicide" section also details various other factors that are more probable than banning a specific kind of poison (namely: the civil war that was raging in Sri Lanka during almost all of time period when suicide rates fell, consistent with the article's remark that suicide rates do typically fall significantly during times of war).
- The Montreal article only concludes that suicide specifically by jumping did not displace to other jumping sites. It makes no conclusion around other means of suicide (and while suicide rates did fall in general, the article states that this trend began 5 years before the installation of the nets on the studied bridge).
EDIT: in general, I don't feel like any of those sources do an adequate job of isolating these potential causes from other factors; they do demonstrate at least some correlation, but - as the saying famously goes - correlation != causation, and there are numerous other factors that tend to drive suicide rates, especially socioeconomic and cultural.
I know the US is just very bad at this, but you can literally look at other countries and learn from their experiences. I know, some of them don't speak the same language, but it turns out Americans are just human like everybody else.
Interventions _work_ without making suicide impossible, because the suicide victims aren't rational people looking to kill themselves, they are crazy and have fixated on a plan that would kill them. When the plan doesn't work they are reset by that and most won't kill themselves.
The most internationally famous example is Town Gas. Britain used to make a dangerous but useful flammable gas called "Town Gas" by processing coal. The gas burned reasonably cleanly and coal was readily available, but the gas was toxic and so you may have heard the phrase "Stick your head in the oven" - the idea isn't that you could somehow cook your own head, but toxic Town Gas will poison you and you'd die. Britain used to see lots of suicides by this method.
And then, not to prevent suicide but for simple economic reasons having discovered huge natural gas reserves in the North Sea, Britain switched to Natural Gas. Things had to be reconfigured, there are still left-over buildings and equipment littering the country decades later, but it just made obvious economic sense to switch. Natural Gas, however, though technically it could suffocate you, isn't poisonous and is very disinterested in remaining even a poorly ventilated kitchen, it just floats off. So people who lay down with their head in the oven after Natural Gas didn't die. They'd lay there, and eventually they'd realise this isn't working - and they would get up and get on with their lives.
This _actually worked_ entirely by accident, the suicide rate dropped significantly. A natural experiment, and to refuse to learn from that is extremely dense.
And if guns aren't available, they'll fixate on a plan which does not involve them. The coal→natgas switch only worked to prevent suicides because (at least per your description) people still expected the gas to kill them; if suicidal people already know ahead of time that a particular strategy is not actually an option (e.g. because they know they can't get guns, or they know that the gas in their ovens ain't toxic), then they'll consider some other strategy in the "pick a strategy" stage of suicidal ideation.
That is: this sort of "prevention" is temporary at best. Even in the UK, phasing out coal gas only decreased suicides specifically via carbon monoxide inhalation, while other methods of suicide rose in frequency [1]. The overall rate did decrease, but more for males than females (who readily seemed to start flocking toward other methods of suicide, at least per the graphs and the apparent far-more-modest decrease in overall suicide rate), and primarily only in England and Wales (Scotland's male suicide rate barely budged, and the female suicide rate held steady, with a visible switch from CO suicide to non-CO suicide in the graphs).
Hangings are currently the most common means of suicide in the UK [2], with poisonings a close second among women. Neither of these are likely to go away any time soon without actually addressing why people feel inclined to self-terminate in the first place (unless you're going to propose trying to ban all alcohol and drugs - like the US tried (and failed) to do - and require background checks and mental health checks when buying ropes and bedsheets, and even that almost certainly won't be effective).
You have to be prepared for legislation like this only slightly decrease the number of suicides but drastically increase the suffering of the people that do.
From wikipedia's page on LN2:
> the liquid-to-gas expansion ratio of nitrogen is 1:694 at 20 °C (68 °F)
(so it can easily displace a lot of air in a small volume and)
>As liquid nitrogen evaporates it reduces the oxygen concentration in the air and can act as an asphyxiant, especially in confined spaces. Nitrogen is odorless, colorless, and tasteless and may produce asphyxia without any sensation or prior warning
Yes!
One thing that help to increase mass shootings and suicide was the anti-asylum movement. many people who clearly are a danger to himself and others should be hospitalized. unfortunately asylum got a bad reputation for inhumane treatments, but modern psychiatric treatment is completely different that the past inhumane treatments.
I'm on board with increased access to mental health facilities, but I'm skeptical of using them for convicts unless the convict consents. Psychiatric treatment often involves medication, and I don't believe anyone should be forced to take medicine, especially mind-altering medication.
For many however - through personal experience - it is something planned for, hoped for, dreamed about - for as long as decades.
Which is why there has been a push to secure bridges and add crisis phone lines to these areas.
We should be tackling the problem from every direction. I'd love for it to happen but it sure doesn't seem like the US is going to make any progress in guaranteed access to mental health services anytime soon.