Wyoming is a very red/Republican state and do love their guns. Can't make a post about literally anything without someone bringing guns into it and then ignore the fact that guns are the more commonly used form of suicide among Wyoming teens. Easily accessible and pretty damn fatal. Apparently nobody practices gun safety here and locks their guns up out of reach of the kids.
Yes. When we talk about guns, we too often talk about scenarios that, while individually dramatic, are too rare to have big impacts on mortality -- e.g., some dude with an assault weapon gunning down a bunch of people all at once. When it comes to the total gun death toll, though, it's mostly about handguns used in individual murders, as part of routine criminal activity or crimes of passion, and it's also about accidental shootings and suicides. Saturate a society with guns, like WY, AK, and MT, and you're going to get a lot of people blowing their heads off.
With guns, a lot of it comes down to the way they shorten the distance between a violent impulse and a killing to the length of a trigger pull. That applies with both murder and suicide. With a murder, people who'd have gotten control of themselves a couple seconds into beating someone, if they were just hitting them with a pool cue, for instance, don't get that time to stop seeing red if they had a loaded gun on hand. With a suicide, people who might have come to their senses and called an ambulance if they'd taken a handful of pills, don't get that time to realize there are other options, if they had a loaded gun on hand. Guns tend to cause mere instants of insanity to have irreversible consequences.
