[spaceribs]

Agreed that the overall quality of life is lower in rural counties which is leading to a mental health crisis, and agreed on the right to suicide.

This amount of suicides from people who I assume are mostly able bodied and otherwise healthy though by gun indicates a few things to me though:

1. Guns are an extremely effective and fast method of suicide.

2. Sudden depression or psychosis could happen to anyone.

3. A mental state can be and usually is transitory or treatable.

I think my belief from the above is that this is a safety issue in terms of the immediacy of the act, rather than the act itself. Taking pills, jumping from a bridge, asphyxiation all take time and planning. All you need is one gun in your house for self-defense bought years ago or inherited/borrowed from a close associate, or even for hunting, and there's nothing our societal safety net or your future self can provide for protection from your present self.

I have a friend who was admitted to the hospital for medically induced psychosis (a known side effect of the medication prescribed by his doctor), it scares me to think that anyone trusts that their brain chemistry and state is this solid and unwavering foundation of sanity, that's simply not always the case.

[FatCat1978]

> nothing our societal safety net or your future self can provide for protection from your present self.

That's generally the case of rural living as a whole. Internet? fat chance before starlink. have fun with dialup or horrendous phone. This alone limits your financial flexibility greatly. Thank god Starlink exists now.

Have a heart attack? Have fun being dead or getting over it on your own by the time an ambulance shows up!

Ditto for pretty much anything. House fire? tough tits, the fire department will show up an hour later to make sure there's no embers.

Legislation? Unless your state/province is mostly rural (which it pretty much never is), Urbanites are the golden goose. 90% of legislation is made with them in mind.

This has lead rural communities to be entirely self reliant, for good reason. they don't have society to rely on. They, more than pretty much any urbanite, have actual reason to have guns. Taking them away isn't going to change the fact that nobody gives a shit about them on a systemic level lol, and if anything will probably make them resent urbanites more for taking their shit away.

[spaceribs]

The voting power of a person in NYC is 0.8 compared to 3.04 in Wyoming. [https://medium.com/practical-coding/whats-my-vote-worth-3ca2...]

I understand that there's a privilege involved in even having a close community, I recognize that and cherish that I have not only neighbors but close friends living less than 30 feet from me. I also recognize that the problems I have in a city are a planet's difference compared to rural living.

That said, I think people who live rural are putting themselves at serious risk by embracing social isolation, and the data describes that. I'm extremely happy about starlink because for people's health, we need that kind of infrastructure to keep people connected, and extremely unhappy that we couldn't build it out faster. Everyone should have a right to community.

As for guns, the UK allows anyone to own a gun through a licensing program [https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58198857]. It's probably the most onerous requirements in the world, but they also have the lowest rates of gun death (both homicide and suicide) [https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...]. Guns are considered a privilege, not a right, and so the likelihood of even running into someone with a gun who might be threatening your life either in the city or the country, is significantly smaller.

I'm not expecting a constitutional amendment, but getting back to my previous argument, we rammed through drug laws without a second thought to the implications of the constitution or the effect it would have on my city, and we could certainly do that here by regulating black powder in the same way we regulate fentanyl.

I have a feeling people don't like this argument on either side because it reveals something hypocritical from both perspectives. The anti-gun crowd is very focused on the machine and the fear it instills, take away the AK47 and you're left with something that doesn't instill the same sort of emotional reaction, and much of their argument is built on that. The pro-gun crowd hates it not just because in creates regulation without taking away their guns (an entirely legal argument i'm sure), it flips the script toward a gun seller being a fentanyl dealer and a gun owner being a fentanyl user, which considering the numbers, isn't that far off apparently.