How many is your sample size?

That’s a good question.

I have one friend who has kept two other people’s guns when they were having suicidal thoughts. I have many other friends who are ex-military and very tuned in to the real dangerous of suicide, who would almost assuredly entrust their firearms to brothers in arms, friends, or family if they were going through something similar.

But I know I personally never remotely considered the thing until I wrote the article. I had no idea, and I have firearms in my house. (locked, unloaded, and very safely stored due to children) I had no idea. So for me, I only generated my own awareness of this problem by literally stumbling into it while writing one of the (now seven) articles on gun policy, and I was floored by the numbers. And I’m positive that many gun owners in this country don’t understand the numbers either, because the media completely downplays this in favor of their mass-shooting rifle narrative, in their mad scramble to conjure clicks on secondary traffic.

So I’m positive there are a lot of people who have no idea that male suicide is the real problem, and that having a gun in the home is correlated with suicide rate among men. There is a tremendous awareness gap here, and closing that awareness gap alone could save thousands of lives per year. Far more than are killed in mass shootings, and probably even more than are killed in gang crime. That’s a stark realization, and it’s important to get out.