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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, APRIL 8, 2016
In West, region of guns and suicide, outreach to curb deaths
Guns are integral
part of daily life
By DAVID CRARY
Associated Press
M
ONTROSE, Colo. — Keith Carey is
a gunsmith in Montrose, a town with
a frontier Àavor set amid the rocky
mesas of western Colorado. He’s a staunch,
though soft-spoken, defender of the right to bear
arms.
<et now he’s also a willing recruit in a Àedg-
ling effort to see if the gun community itself
— sellers and owners of ¿rearms, operators
of shooting ranges — can help Colorado and a
swath of other Western states reduce their high-
est-in-the-nation suicide rates.
“Suicide is a tragedy no matter how it’s
done,” said Carey, whose adult daughter killed
herself with a mix of alcohol and antidepres-
sants a few years ago on the East Coast. How-
ever, he sees the logic in trying gun-speci¿c
prevention strategies in towns like Montrose,
where guns are an integral part of daily life.
“It’s very expedient for people to commit
suicide by a ¿rearm, without too much fore-
thought,” Carey said. “Unfortunately, it’s gen-
erally effective.”
So at the urging of a local police commander,
Carey agreed last year to participate in the Gun
Shop Project, a state-funded pilot program in
which gun sellers and range operators in ¿ve
western Colorado counties were invited to help
raise awareness about suicide. It’s a tentative
but promising bid to open up a conversation on
a topic that’s been virtually taboo in these West-
ern states: the intersection of guns and suicide.
The counter in Carey’s tiny shop — where
he repairs horns and woodwinds as well as guns
— now displays wallet-sized cards with infor-
mation about a suicide hotline. A poster by the
door offers advice about ways to keep guns out
of the hands of friends or relatives at risk of kill-
ing themselves.
“Consider offering to hold on to their guns or
to help store their guns temporarily,” the poster
says. “You may save a life.”
Carey says some of his customers take mate-
rials home, or ask a few questions. But the con-
versations tend to be brief.
“Suicide is one of those morose subjects that
a lot of us don’t want to talk about,” he said.
“But it’s all too common. I believe any method
of suicide prevention is worth a good hard try.”
David Crary/AP Photo
Josh O’Neal, general manager of the Rocky Mountain Gun Club in Grand Junction, Colo., stands in front of a display of firearms at the
state-of-the-art shooting range. O’Neal says safety is a high priority at the facility, but he and his staff are apprehensive regarding the
possibility that a suicidal person might rent a gun at the site and then kill themselves.
Nearly two-thirds of gun deaths
Across the U.S., suicides account for nearly
two-thirds of all gun deaths — far outnum-
bering gun homicides and accidental deaths.
In 2014, according to federal data, there were
,99 ¿rearm deaths 21,4 of them were sui-
cides. That ¿gure represents about half of all
suicides that year but in several western Colo-
rado counties, and in some other Rocky Moun-
tain states with high gun-ownership rates, more
than 0 percent of suicides involve ¿rearms.
A map of state suicide rates reveals a strik-
ing pattern. Along with Alaska, the states with
the highest rates form a contiguous bloc of the
interior West — Montana, Idaho, Wyoming,
Nevada, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. All
have age-adjusted suicide rates at least 50 per-
cent higher than the national rate of 12.93 sui-
cides per 100,000 people Montana’s rate,
23.80, is the highest in the nation.
Between 2000 and 2014, gun suicides
increased by more than 51 percent in those
states, while rising by less than 30 percent
nationwide.
Theories abound as to why residents of this
Western region kill themselves at such high
?
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David Crary/AP Photo
David Crary/AP Photo
Martha Graf, left, executive director of the Western Colorado Suicide Prevention Founda-
tion, and Cindy Haerle, a board member of the foundation, look at one of the suicide-pre-
vention posters that are being distributed to gun shops and shooting ranges in and
around Grand Junction, Colo. Haerle’s brother, John, killed himself with a pistol shot
when he was 29 after prolonged struggles with depression.
rates. Commonly cited factors include the iso-
lation and economic hard times that are preva-
lent in rural areas of these states. A University of
Utah psychiatrist, Perry Renshaw, contends that
the lower oxygen levels of higher altitudes con-
tribute to elevated suicide rates.
There’s also widespread belief that a self-re-
liant frontier mindset — admirable in many cir-
cumstances — deters some Westerners from
seeking help when depression sinks in.
“We embrace the cowboy mentality,” says
Jarrod Hindman, director of Colorado’s Of¿ce
of Suicide Prevention. “If you’re suffering, suck
it up, pick yourself up by your boot straps. But
that doesn’t work very well if you’re suicidal.”
Underlying all these explanations is the fact
that ¿rearms — the most effective of all the
common means of suicide — are more ubiqui-
tous in the West than in most other parts of the
country.
The grave site of Matt Townsend in a ceme-
tery in Grand Junction, Colo.; the tombstone
was designed to reflect his passion for play-
ing pool. Townsend, who fatally shot himself
in 1989 at the age of 33, had been a close
friend since childhood of Jim Doody, who
went on to serve as mayor and city councilor.
Catherine Barber, a suicide prevention
expert at the Harvard School of Public Health,
says numerous studies show that residents of
gun-owning homes are at substantially higher
risk of suicide than other people — simply
because a suicide attempt is more likely to
involve a gun and thus prove fatal. According
to federal estimates, suicide attempts involving
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