At best you're ignorant and at worst your intentionally lying because you'd rather people died than you had to actually prove you were a responsible gun owner. Either way, your "gut feelings" about suicide are demonstrably wrong.
Means reduction is a massive part of suicide prevention, at both a social and personal level. It's why they take away knives but not spoons, despite a determined enough person being able to kill themselves with basically anything, even gravity.
And do you know how many people who survive a suicide attempt go on to die by suicide? 1 in 10. Do you know how many people survive suicide attempts with guns? Basically 0.
Even your "it's a mental health problem" excuse is bullshit.
I know the motivation is to demand something impossible is done before you will even consider gun control -- in this case, accessible mental healthcare for every man, woman and child in America that can instantly cure them of complex problems far beyond even the most cutting edge medical science, so completely that they will never relapse for even a minute, delivered within a budget of $0.
But do you know what you're actually doing? Admitting that the American public are simply not healthy enough for such permissive gun laws to be safe.
So how about we just take your guns away and when you've finished building that impossible mental healthcare network, you can have them back.
Yeah how dare "the government" tell you not to go on a killing spree that targets children or threaten your wife with a gun if she tries to leave.
You can feign all the melodramatic indignation you want but your peers and politicians have shown over and over again how little they actually believe in the "freedom" you claim to value.
The majority of the pro-gun crowd staunchly vote Republican, the party that says you can't smoke pot or can't pay a consenting adult for sex and they can listen on your phone whenever they want.
And of course like every government, they also say you can't build your own home with your own hands, can't own land mines and hand grenades, can't drive or fly without a license, can't run a kitchen from a public toilet and a million other rules that the pro-gun crowd doesn't object to because they know there are massive public safety risks without those regulations.
But the moment someone suggests adding semi-automatic guns to that list, the pro-gun beat their chest and pretend they rule themselves as free and independent men who don't need no society.
And the moment a Republican in a gun-happy, right-wing state suggests banning gay or interracial marriage (again) or executing women who have abortions, they cheer furiously.
Not of your freedoms came from the barrel or a gun, nor your own hand, nor the people you support.
In Colorado we recently voted to help people commit suicide if their circumstances suck enough, and I’m for that.
I think if you take away a person’s means of suicide you are encasing them in a prison of flesh. A person has the right to decide whether their own life continues and if your plan for suicide prevention is to remove the means, it just means you’re willing to force people to suffer fates worse than death.
Congratulations on one of the grossest pro-gun takes I've seen in a while. I'd genuinely love to know if you actually believed what you were saying and if not, if the morality of what you were advocating crossed your mind at any point. My bet would be that you're so far gone that it didn't, you just wanted to rush to defend guns.
Anyway, to address your misinformation: Colorado passed a "death with dignity" law that allows terminally ill patients to request assisted suicide.
Before that request is granted, they need to have a terminal illness, make multiple requests at least 2 weeks apart, be judged capable of making the decision and not in any way cooreced.
After which, they are given medication to end their life, rather than their husband or fathers AR-15 so they can spray their brains all over the ceiling, traumatising the people who find them, the people who clean up their remains and apparently bloodthirsty gun owners who wished they could have watched.
Every single person involved in assisted dying opposes the use of the word "suicide". These are people who want to live but don't have the option, so choose to go painlessly on their own terms, rather in agony in a hospital bed.
Actual suicide is an act of desperation. That's why means reduction and survivability play such huge roles -- if you can delay a suicide for even minutes, you dramatically increase the chances that people will reach out (or be discovered) and get the help they need.
Anyway, you've put dogshit where your brain and soul is supposed to go and if I found out that anyone in my life shared your opinions, I'd cut them from it immediately.