My Dad’s Death and the Forgotten Half of America’s Gun Crisis
On the morning of my dad’s death ten years ago, it took me ten minutes to choose what to wear, toast a blueberry waffle, and pour chai into a thermos. It took ten minutes to drive myself to school and choose a spot in the parking lot designated for high school seniors, a cohort that I finally belonged to. Within the next ten minutes, I opted to leave my umbrella in my car and arrived at calculus class with damp hair.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Each of these quick decisions unfolded in the same amount of time it likely took my dad to plan and execute his suicide.
In the months leading up to his death, my dad struggled with double vision and a limp that doctors couldn’t get to the bottom of. It’s possible that those symptoms were caused by neurological damage from two brain tumor surgeries he had when I was young, or from another condition like multiple sclerosis, though he never received a diagnosis.
Even so, my dad’s suicide was shocking. Despite his physical impairments, he worked every weekday, ran with me on the beach, and advised me on my college applications. He showed no obvious signs of depression. Even the people closest to him didn’t know the depth of his pain, because of his calm, reserved demeanor. In a tribute that my dad’s coworkers published after he died, his boss wrote that he would be “remembered for his laid-back California surfer style, masking a dedicated professional who was easy on the smiles and rigorous in his follow-up.”
The time between deciding to end one’s life and performing self harm is, often, no more than ten minutes, according to a 2021 study of unsuccessful suicide attempts. Following whatever intrusive thought my dad had on that December morning a decade ago, it wouldn’t have taken more than ten minutes for him to write his suicide note on the desktop computer, walk upstairs to the printer, and bring it back to the office where he would kill himself. I hate to imagine it took only a few more minutes for him to get the gun down from the top shelf of the closet—a gun I didn’t even know he owned—and load it.
My dad was not vocal about being a gun owner. The only guns I’d ever seen him use were the BB guns we learned how to fire at the father-daughter camp we visited in the San Diego mountains every fall of my elementary school years. He taught me how to look through the viewfinder, aim at the tower of soda cans fifty feet away, and puncture the aluminum with tiny holes. Was this enough practice for him to know how to use the gun that would kill him? Did he have to read an instruction manual? Watch a YouTube video? Perhaps, then, the time between wanting to die and executing his suicide was far more than ten minutes. I’ll never know.
What I do know is that access to a gun made my dad eight times more likely to die by suicide, primarily because firearms are the most lethal suicide method, according to a 2020 study by researchers at Stanford University. When a gun isn’t available, suicide attempts are typically “not fatal, and most people who attempt suicide do not go on to die in a future suicide,” the researchers wrote. Owning a gun, in other words, can turn an intrusive thought into a death much faster and more effectively. It is impossible, then, not to place some of the blame for my dad’s death on the gun, and to wonder if he would be alive now if he hadn’t inherited it from his grandfather thirty years before.
I am haunted by the thought that, in the split second between pulling the trigger and impact, my dad might’ve realized all that he would miss by leaving my mom, sister, and me, and wished to change his mind. Ken Baldwin, who survived after a suicide jump off the Golden Gate Bridge when he was twenty-eight, told The New Yorker in 2003 that, while in mid-air, he “instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”
Could issues in my dad’s life have been fixed if he didn’t have the swift way out that the gun provided? He was scheduled for an eye surgery to repair his double vision just three weeks after his suicide, which surely would’ve improved his daily life. And with more time, it’s possible doctors would’ve found a solution for his limp, which was especially frustrating, given that his favorite activities were skiing and running. At a minimum, maybe he could’ve seen a psychiatrist who would help him realize that staying alive meant watching just one more episode of Lost with me, or summiting another mountain with my grandfather, or meeting my sister’s baby, his first grandson.
The United States is home to the highest gun ownership rate in the world. Since the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791, firearms have been regarded as “necessary to the security of a free State.” While gun ownership over the last few decades has been dominated by conservative, white men, recent years have shown an uptick in gun purchases by liberal Americans and women. I understand this desire for self-protection, particularly for people who feel increasingly threatened by political violence, police brutality, and crime.
Still, what is often thought of as a form of self-protection is also a personal threat. Of all gun-related deaths in 2023, 58% were suicides. Painfully tragic school shootings and stories of murder dominate the gun control debate. But in America, we are often more dangerous to ourselves than others are to us.
This was not always the case. In the early 1990s, the rates of gun-induced suicides and homicides in America were about equal. But in the three decades since, gun homicides have fallen sharply while the gun suicide rate has remained steady. In 2022, the rate of suicides involving guns in the United States reached the highest level since officials began tracking it more than 50 years ago.
Research shows that fewer people die by suicide when it’s harder to die by suicide. So-called means restriction—the modification of an environment to decrease access to suicide means—is the intervention measure with the strongest empirical support.
For instance, when Britain removed carbon monoxide from its public gas supply in the 1960s and 1970s, the annual number of suicides in England and Wales showed a sudden, unexpected decline. Gas accounted for nearly half of suicides in the region before the carbon monoxide removal began, and researchers found that those prevented from accessing gas didn’t appear to find some other way of killing themselves. Restriction of one method of suicide, in other words, did not inevitably lead to a compensating rise in the use of others.
Of suicide attempts using a gun, nearly 90% result in death, while only 4% of suicide attempts by other means are fatal. Because suicidal crises are often short-lived, restricted access to the most lethal self-harm methods saves lives. In states with the strongest firearm safety laws—including background checks, waiting periods, and secure storage requirements—gun suicides fell over the past two decades, while states with the weakest laws experienced a 39% increase, according to a study from Everytown, a gun violence research organization.
“When things are going badly in your life and you feel like you want to die, and then you try to commit suicide, if there’s a gun handy, you will die,” David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, told Current Affairs in 2023. “If there’s not a gun handy and instead you take 100 pills, medical science can help you and will. Virtually everybody who doesn’t die is happy that they didn’t.”
Laws that require gun owners to secure their firearms when they’re not in their immediate possession have been shown to reduce the youth firearm suicide rate, though those regulations are only active in five states. There’s also an opportunity to expand laws that temporarily restrict access to guns for individuals at risk of harming themselves or others. These red flag laws, which are in place in 21 states and Washington, D.C., have been found to be an effective suicide prevention tool.
A handful of local governments and organizations have come up with further solutions. In San Jose, California, gun-owning residents are charged an annual fee, the revenues from which are used for suicide and domestic violence prevention. And in Missouri, where gun restrictions are minimal, a group called End Family Fire started a campaign in 2022 to promote safe firearm storage practices and encourage families to have conversations about gun ownership.
Being vocal about the dangers guns present to vulnerable people is nearly as important as gun policy. It’s why suicide researchers recommend that doctors speak with family members about the removal of lethal self-harm methods from the reach of vulnerable kin. And it’s why, after years of either lying about how my dad died or avoiding the subject altogether, I’m no longer willing to be silent.
Roughly a third of Americans own guns. I can’t help but wonder: If my dad wasn’t part of that group, could his hope have been restored in those ten minutes? Perhaps our cat, Romeo, would have come into the office to sit on his lap, reminding him of the family he held so dear. Or maybe he would have received the text messages from his best friend, sent later that morning, asking how he was doing. Perhaps, when I got home from high school that afternoon, I would’ve arrived to find my dad relaxing in his brown leather chair in the living room, rather than a squadron of police cars and yellow caution tape. Ultimately, and unfortunately, the answers to those questions are unknowable to me—just as the grief his suicide would cause was unknowable to him.
If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental-health crisis or contemplating suicide, call or text 988. In emergencies, call 911, or seek care from a local hospital or mental health provider.