Psychology Today Thinks Answer to Suicides is Gun Control Not, You Know, Psychology

Psychology is a fascinating subject to me. Understanding how the human mind works is something that I think is of the utmost importance, and we need to devote a lot of resources toward that. The fact that there’s a replication crisis in psychology isn’t evidence that the study should be abandoned, in my mind, but that we need to figure out what the problem is so we can get stuff right.

But psychology has more problems than being unable to replicate studies.

It seems at least some psychologists think that psychology isn’t all that useful in preventing things like suicides, apparently.

So, where does all this leave people in the U.S.? Do we continue to accept an increasing number of firearm suicides, homicides, and mass shootings as the cost of living—and dying—in America?

We don’t have to. Several steps can be taken to reduce gun violence in this country, particularly gun suicides. One is universal background checks. Another is implementing a 10-day waiting period to buy a firearm. A third is enacting “red-flag” laws that enable police and immediate family members to remove guns from people who pose a threat to themselves or to others. A fourth is requiring gun owners to store their weapons safely. A fifth is banning the sale of high-caliber assault weapons.

None of these takes away the existing weapons of responsible gun owners or prevents them from buying more handguns and rifles. None infringes on their rights to protect themselves, to hunt, or to shoot recreationally. Their purpose is to ensure that firearms are used safely, the same way that traffic codes exist for drivers to operate motor vehicles safely. Is that too much to ask?

Let’s look at the last paragraph first. That argument, such as it is, looks familiar. “We’re going to ban you from buying certain things, throw in a bunch of hoops and red tape, and make it as hard as possible for you to buy or own a gun, but we’re not infringing on your rights.”

But look at the second paragraph for a moment. Especially where it says, “Several steps can be taken to reduce gun violence in this country, particularly gun suicides. One is universal background checks.”

So, to prevent suicides, instead of psychologists doing their jobs, we should have universal background checks that wouldn’t do anything at all to reduce suicides? Seriously?

Now, I think I get what the author, John Bateson, is trying to get at when he follows that up with a 10-day waiting period. If you have a universal background check law, then people would be forced to wait the 10 days, no matter who they buy the gun from. But that’s me having to guess as to where he sees the relationship. He sure as hell did lay it out for anyone.

And I’d like to point out that every study I’ve seen on waiting periods impacting suicides has focused exclusively on “gun suicides.” They’ve never looked at the impact of waiting periods in comparison to the overall suicide rate. If 100 people kill themselves in Year A, 50 of whom use a gun, and in Year B, only 25 use a firearm, it’s not exactly an improvement if 105 people commit suicide.

They never look at that. I wonder why?

Before getting to this bit, Bateson outlines the response to mass shootings in countries like the UK and Australia, but he fails to note that all of them keep having mass shootings. While they might not be on the scale of something like Port Arthur, nothing before then was on that scale, either. The status quo being maintained after an outlier is far from proof that the gun laws work.

What really gets me is that psychology is the one science that has a chance of not just reducing suicides of all causes, but any mass murder as well. They’ll never eliminate them–nothing will, unfortunately–but they could reduce them significantly. Only, instead of doing that, they’re pretending the issue is that the gun laws aren’t strict enough.

This is why academia has such little trust these days. Instead of actually looking at their wheelhouse and focusing one what they can do within that context, they want to infringe on our rights and use their appeal to authority to try and facilitate that.

No wonder they can’t figure out why they’re unable to replicate any of their studies. That would require effort.

Editor’s Note: Academia, with the help of the mainstream media, continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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