Sunday, April 27, 2008

Guns for Protection and "Adult Melancholy"

Over at Stand Firm they are talking about guns tonight. I do admire people who have learned to handle guns properly and care enough to protect their families. Greg Griffith talks about using guns for protection, but where I live, people seem to use guns to commit suicide and kill their own families.

At Stand Firm, Moot expressed discomfort with keeping a gun in the house and referred to “grown-up melancholy”. None of the other commenters picked up on it.
http://www.standfirminfaith.com/index.php/site/article/12054
But at Stand Firm, I have been on threads where one regular commenter was talking about being suicidal. And on one thread, another commenter was still in mourning over the suicide of someone.

This spring there have been two suicides in my extended social group. My father’s cousin’s side of the family had a young man commit suicide. And my husband had a work colleague kill himself a week ago. And last June, my dermatologist and her two daughters were shot and killed by her husband, right before he shot himself. I don’t know of anyone having their house broken into.

1 comment:

mousestalker said...

In the Catholic understanding of things, suicide is typically seen as a mortal sin and one that is unforgiveable. I stray from orthodox Catholic dogma on this to the extent that I think that only God knows the state of any given soul.

But the damage suicide does to a family is profound. As a Christian, I'm finding forgiving someone who has committed suicide very difficult.

On the lighter topic of guns: In the US we use guns to commit suicide because guns are available. The Japanese have no access to guns, yet kill themselves at a much higher rate than we do. In the two suicides that I have personal knowledge of, I don't think restricting access to firearms would have helped. I wish there were such a simple solution.