|
Abstract
|
Ralph Demicco feels as though he has watched the 53-minute surveillance video 100 times, searching it for clues to preventing tragedy. He sees a young man walk into his gun shop in Hooksett, N.H. The man asks about buying a handgun. “He engaged the clerk in small talk, totally disarmed the clerk,” Demicco says. “No way in heck that clerk would suspect that three quarters of an hour after the conversation that person would take his life.”
And yet the 24-year-old man did kill himself, pulling the trigger soon after leaving the boxy beige building. Nor was he the only customer who did so. In one awful week in 2009, he and two other people came into the shop, which Demicco no longer owns, bought guns and used the purchases shortly thereafter to kill themselves.
The experience shook Demicco and prompted him to help found a movement that links members of the firearm community with public health experts to prevent suicides by raising awareness about gun safety, among other things. Its leaders are realists who accept that very strict, European-style gun control is not politically feasible in the U.S. and would, in any case, be a nonstarter for most gun sellers, who oppose such control. But they also know that households that keep guns and ammunition in separate, locked locations and store their guns unloaded have much lower risks of accidental or intentional deaths from firearms. In addition, as a further safety measure, the group seeks to make it socially acceptable for relatives and friends to offer to hold on to a potentially suicidal gun owner's weapons until the crisis has passed.
The public safety campaign is admittedly modest so far, consisting mainly of distributing posters and brochures about suicide to gun shops. Still, its start in a state whose motto is “Live Free or Die” shows that the long-standing political stalemate over gun-control laws need not prevent progress from being made....
Language: en |