A Deadly Link: Guns and Suicide

                                                
Uni High, in collaboration with WILL, present the following special podcast series, “Changing the Narrative: Preventing Gun Violence in Champaign-Urbana.”

Written by Anya Kaplan-Hartnett

[music]

Florence Lin, Narrator: 

Gun violence is a pervasive issue for our community. According to the News Gazette, the daily newspaper of record in Champaign, Illinois, 35 people in Champaign-Urbana have died due to gun-related incidents between 2014 and 2019 alone, which demonstrates a marked increase in the frequency and severity of these violent events. However, our community has responded with determination and compassion in order to work towards a more peaceful future. This podcast delves into the essential anti-violence work being done in Champaign-Urbana. We’ve interviewed local activists, organizers, politicians, and entrepreneurs to learn more about counteracting gun violence. This is “A Deadly Link: Guns and Suicide,” the third in our series, “Changing the Narrative, Preventing Gun Violence on Champaign-Urbana. From Uni High, I’m Florence Lin, a current sophomore and a member of the Class of 2023.

The previous podcast explained how Illinois state gun legislation regulates the sale and possession of firearms. This episode switches tracks to consider the connections between gun violence and mental health issues. We’ll also learn about how gun control and suicide prevention work together. A warning: This program contains graphic descriptions of gun violence and may not be appropriate for all listeners.

[music]

James Seikel

The gentleman had a severe traumatic event. He had been a regular customer so we had no idea what was going on, he did not inform us. He came in, he checked in like he always does. He always rents firearms because he doesn’t own any because his wife doesn’t want them in the house. He went out on to the range. He among, I think there were two other people. He got out there, shot for, probably a good ten minutes. With the last magazine, chose to end his life.”

Florence Lin, Narrator: 

That was James Seikel, the manager of High Caliber Training Center and Indoor Range in Urbana, Illinois, telling us about a man who took his own life at the range in 2016. This tragedy was not an isolated incident. Research from Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health identified over 50 suicides at shooting ranges in 16 different states in the past five years alone. This tragic pattern speaks to the larger issue of gun-related suicide. Suicide by gun is the deadliest and most common suicide method. As such, conversations about reforming gun laws go hand in hand with suicide prevention. 

[music]



Florence Lin, Narrator: 

The local organization Rattle the Stars focuses on educating the Champaign-Urbana community about teen and young adult suicide prevention. Kim Bryan founded this organization in response to a family tragedy.

Kim Bryan 

We started this organization in 2016, and I started it with my family. Unfortunately, I lost my son to suicide. My oldest son died in 2016 when he was 19 years old. My daughter was a junior at Centennial High School at the time that he died. She wanted to start doing something at school for suicide awareness, because it wasn’t something that they talked about at her school. And so we started doing that. She contacted her principal, and they were very supportive, and so we started doing some things in her high school, but really quickly realized that that wasn’t enough, that there was much more needed in the community around suicide prevention. And so we started working on things, and building up, and thinking about educating people, and providing those services to the community.”

Florence Lin, Narrator: 

Rattle the Stars trains the community, including families, friends, and educators, to identify teens and young adults considering suicide. This work involves educating people about how guns play a role in the issue. According to data from the National Institute of Mental Health, about 56% of men and 31% of women who attempt suicide use a firearm. Bryan believes that improving gun safety is essential to reduce the frequency of suicide. 

Kim Bryan 

Americans, you know we have a gun culture. There’s a lot of privately owned firearms in our society. So, they’re there, and they’re available. And, people can access them. Even for adults who have the ability to purchase firearms, there’s unfortunately a lot of cases where young adults who are old enough legally will go purchase a firearm simply for the purpose of suicide. We have a lot of data that shows that that’s the case. So, because they’re accepted we know that they’re part of our society and they’re readily available. Also just because they are very lethal and people know that. They know that if they use a gun they’re very likely to die from their attempt.

Florence Lin, Narrator: 

Specific populations have especially high rates of suicide. For example, suicide is prevalent among veterans, who often suffer from PTSD as a result of their experiences in combat and are also more likely to have access to lethal weapons because of their training. The US Department of Veteran’s Affairs released a 2017 report claiming that veterans commit suicide at a rate 1.5 times greater than the average for civilians. Robert Kouzmanoff, a Champaign County marine veteran, spoke to us about this trend. 

Robert Kouzmanoff 

That is a huge problem in the veteran community, it’s not just Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation During Freedom of Veterans, it’s Vietnam, Korea veterans, first Gulf War veterans. And what I would say is you have brothers and sisters out there, people who have overcome, people who have adapted, to civilian life appropriately talk to us. Get in touch with the VFW’s get in touch with veteran organizations cause it’s full of people like me who will bend over backwards to help.

  

Florence Lin, Narrator: 

An essential component of suicide prevention involves assessing which populations are at higher risk and connecting them with supportive resources to help them heal. Additionally, a method called “means safety” aims to reduce the availability of lethal means to people at risk. 

Kim Bryan 

Means safety is basically trying to limit a person’s ability to use that means of suicide, or that method. So the two that we focus on, because they are two of the most common, are firearms and medications. So we do very specifically talk about those in our training, and we talk to people about, if you do know somebody who is having thoughts of suicide, it’s really important to talk to them about whether they have medications in their home, whether they have firearms in their home, and if they do, then we need to work on how we can limit their access to those things. And what we know from research, is that it is actually a really effective suicide prevention method. There’s kind of a misconception that people think, “Well, if you limit access to one thing, they’re just going to use something else.” And that’s actually not true. Most people don’t. So we know that limiting access to those things, it is really effective for preventing people from even making that attempt.

Florence Lin, Narrator: 

Because of the connection between suicidal thoughts and access to firearms, Illinois legislation aims to restrict those who may harm themselves from purchasing guns. James Seikel explains how the mandatory 72-hour waiting period and the Firearm Owner’s Identification, or FOID card, requirements help reduce the risk of suicide. 

James Seikel 

The functions around suicide are built around, a lot of the waiting periods are built on the idea that somebody will buy a gun and immediately use it to commit suicide. It’s a little harder to do in Illinois, you have to use a FOID card, to start with. That’s at least a month process. [...] So you have to put some forethought into, if you don’t already own a firearm, to, I’m intending to use a firearm to commit suicide. 

Florence Lin, Narrator: 

In addition to enforcing state and local gun laws, shooting ranges do their best to follow strict safety protocols. But, as Seikel learned in 2016, there’s no way to be completely certain that someone with access to a weapon will be safe. 

James Seikel 

You don’t want to be the person that when something happens you don’t want to be the person who sold it to them. Even if you did everything possible in that moment to try to vet them, you’re never going to be 100 percent able to get to where that wouldn’t be a possibility.

 

Florence Lin, Narrator: 

Many gun-related suicides result from the illegal acquisition of a lethal weapon. Additionally, people who experience suicidal thoughts often use an unprotected weapon that belongs to a family member or friend. A group of researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health published a landmark paper in 2011 with the shocking statistic that over 80% of child suicides by gun were carried out using a family member’s weapon.

Kim Bryan 

They’re stored in their home unlocked. And so what parents typically think is, “Well, I’ve taught my child, right? My child knows not to touch my guns, or knows how to use them safely,” but that isn’t really effective when a person is in crisis and suicidal. So, we really try to talk to parents about making sure that, all the time, you’re storing your guns safely because you never know, and a lot of times we don’t know when somebody in our family is at risk for suicide. We’re not very good at identifying people who are at risk, unfortunately. And so really the best thing is to just take those precautions all the time, so that that way when you do have somebody who’s at risk, they don’t have access to that method.

Florence Lin, Narrator: 

The local chapter of Moms Demand Action also promotes firearm safety through community trainings and outreach events. Chapter member and former local group lead, Jen Straub, explains their efforts to teach families about safely storing their guns. 

Jen Straub 

We believe in responsible gun ownership. So we have, for example, a program called Be Smart, and our Be Smart volunteers go to PTA meetings, go to parenting groups, go to different places where they can talk to groups of adults who interact with children and talk about safe [pause] - well SMART is an acronym and it talks about storage, [pause] modeling responsible behavior to children, and it talks about asking if there are guns in the home and how they’re secured, about recognizing signs of danger when it comes to the children in your home, and their potential risk for suicide, and it talks about talking to other adults about this issue and about how we can make our homes safer. 

Florence Lin, Narrator: 

In addition to safety training and public policy to prevent easy access to firearms, successful suicide prevention creates support networks for at risk students. Tracy Parsons, the Community Relations Manager for the City of Champaign, shares his thoughts about reaching out to struggling youth. 

Tracy Parsons

We have to create more spaces for students to be able to talk about those things and have students feel safe saying, “I’m sad” or “I’m struggling,” or “I’m not popular” or “I don’t have friends.” All those things we have to create spaces for students to be able to talk about and address that. And it’s no different really for adults. It’s like, how do we help people, our society, share, communicate, say that “It’s OK that I’m sad” or “I’m disappointed” and have that not be perceived as a weakness but as a strength. So those are just some of the thoughts I believe we really have to get to as a society as a community to help with our gun violence and those people that choose to respond and react with guns and through guns.

Florence Lin, Narrator: 

Supporting young people with mental health issues is especially important because of the disturbing link between suicidal ideation and mass shootings. According to public data from the organization Everytown for Gun Safety, about 60% of all mass shootings ended with the perpetrator taking their own life or being killed by law enforcement officers. Kim Bryan discusses how these two issues are connected. 

Kim Bryan

They’re very closely connected, and a lot of people—when we think about the issue with mass shootings—especially with young people and school shootings, those kids are showing or talking about suicide or expressing thoughts of suicide well before those actions take place. And the way that we’re starting to understand those behaviors are that they are still very suicidal acts. They typically end with the suicide of the shooter or in some sort of suicide by cop scenario. About three quarters of them end that way. But what that is is the person is still very suicidal, but they’re also angry. They’re angry at other people for not helping them, for not seeing the pain that they were in, so not recognizing all of these other sort of causal or risk factors that they were experiencing for suicide and not helping them. And so it becomes a situation where they’re angry at everybody else, and they’re gonna enact that violence against everybody else before they do it to themselves. And so in that way, we really can’t look at these things as separate. Because they’re so closely linked and intertwined that we have to view them together through the same lens and when we’re looking at those types of scenarios.

Florence Lin, Narrator: 

Kim Bryan referenced “suicide by cop,” which is when a suicidal person takes deliberate action with the assumption that an officer will respond with lethal violence. Similarly, “suicide by brother” involves violence which is displaced onto others.

Kim Bryan

There are other types of suicidal behaviors, and in some contexts we call these indirect suicide. But when we think of it just in that more general way of somebody taking action to end their own life, what we end up with in a lot of our populations that are in those situations where they are really impoverished, there’s not a lot of hope for their future, they don’t have opportunities for jobs and things like that. So when people are living in those circumstances and they can get really hopeless about their life, they can also do other things indirectly that bring about their death. So, Tamar Manasseh, from Moms Against Senseless Killings in Chicago, she kind of termed this “suicide by brother.” So we’ve heard the term suicide by cop, where somebody does something that incites the police to shoot them, but these are things where—and this is recognized in the suicide prevention community in general—where we do have these people who are engaging in community violence knowing that somebody is going to retaliate against them and take their life. So it becomes an acceptable way for them to complete that process without having to take that action against their own body. But if you do something that causes somebody else to do that, it’s a more culturally acceptable way to get to that same end. And so, that is part of the one impetus for community violence in one way. 

Florence Lin, Narrator: 

The interconnectivity of these issues illustrates how mental health services and suicide prevention efforts should be an essential component of community peacebuilding initiatives. Solving these issues requires collaboration. Just as community organizations and activist groups are working to prevent suicides through mentoring and gun reform, Rattle the Stars hopes to become more involved in anti-gun violence efforts. 

Kim Bryan

We’re trying very hard to sort of insert ourselves in this conversation that’s going on in the community right now when it comes to gun violence. And so, I hope that we’re able to do that and provide that service. I think the first step is really getting people to understand that these issues with suicide and violence are very closely connected. They’re not as distinct and separate issues as we typically think. So we’re really working on that first part, and working with a lot of the community groups and people that are working on community violence. And also some of the groups that are working on reducing access to guns and gun legislation, and talking to them about how suicide prevention can be part of what they’re doing and how helpful that can be.

Florence Lin, Narrator: 

Advocates like Kim Bryan want people to understand that suicide is a complex issue deeply rooted in societal problems, rather than an individual choice. Responding to the underlying issues that lead to suicide involves systematic policy change as well as a fundamental shift in the way suicide is discussed. Rattle the Stars hopes to educate our community about suicide with a foundation in empathy and understanding. 

Kim Bryan

We have this myth in our society that it’s an individual choice. That this person chose to do this to themselves. And by thinking of it in that way, we’re not seeing all of those other factors in society and in our communities that are having an effect on people and leading them towards suicide. But when we talk about community violence, or violence in general, that’s more looked at as an act that’s directed towards other people. And so we put a lot of focus on the victims of violence because we tend to think of these people as innocent victims. These are people who did not want this to happen to them. But for people who are victims of suicide, we think that this person chose to do this to themselves. So they don’t quite get as much sympathy. But because of that, they’re viewed very differently, and unfortunately, they’re not.

[music]

Florence Lin, Narrator: 

Thank you for listening to “A Deadly Link: Guns and Suicide,” the third episode of Changing the Narrative: Preventing Gun Violence in Champaign-Urbana, a student-produced podcast by Uni High’s oral history project team. Each episode in this series focuses on a component of anti-violence work, including community organizations, gun legislation, mental health, and trauma recovery. All interviews featured in this podcast were conducted in May 2019 by Uni’s eighth-grade class. Please tune in next week to continue the conversation about violence and mental health, with a focus on addressing community trauma and supporting survivors. If you’d like to listen to previous episodes of Changing the Narrative, check out the WILL website at will.illinois.edu/illinoisyouthmedia.

[music]