Advocates for gun rights, public health team up to prevent suicides

The white, middle-aged man clad in hunter green trousers and polo shirt looks straight into the camera and recounts the dire facts: 86 percent of firearm deaths in Utah are suicides. Last year alone, 562 Utahans took their life. That total doesn’t include attempts, he says, but the death rate goes "way up" when a firearm is used. More than half of Utah suicides involve a firearm. Receive this free special report when you sign up for daily NCR news emails . No, the speaker is not an impassioned advocate of gun control. He’s Clark Aposhian, chair of the Utah Sports Shooting Council , the state’s most powerful pro-gun group, and a firearms instructor teaching the suicide prevention module included in Utah’s required one-day training for a conceal-and-carry permit. Cathy Barber, director of the Means Matter Campaign at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, teamed up with Utah firearm instructors to create the module. That unusual collaboration marks a small, but significant development in the field of public health and gun violence in the United States. Every year, approximately 22,000 Americans kill themselves using firearms, according to latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That tally accounts for 61 percent of all gun deaths nationally; although that percentage differs vastly along color lines, says Barber. Firearm suicide is overwhelmingly a white health crisis. Among whites, 84 percent of all gun deaths are suicides; among blacks, 83 percent of those deaths are homicides. While most […]

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