A perfect example of idiotarian thought processes arrives today courtesy of the New York Times. In writing about suicide in the young, Dorothy Samuels manages to use every statistic she can to support her case, whether they are in fact relevant or whether they actually do support her case. Y’know, I know I’m right, doesn’t matter what the facts are.

In between reinstating every hunter’s sacred Second Amendment right to nail Bambi with an AK-47, and mischievously meddling in local affairs to pass a one-chamber bill to weaken public safety in the nation’s capital, the National Rifle Association and its busy-beaver allies quietly scored another legislative coup – this one without even trying. This little-noted achievement – if you can call it that – relates to a glaring omission in the new initiative to prevent youth suicide just approved by the House and Senate, and awaiting President Bush’s signature.

This is of course pure bullshit. The Second Amendment makes no mention of hunting or hunters. It actually reads “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” which does not appear to contain any reference to Bambi that I can see. The change in the DC laws seems simply to offer to those who live there the same constitutional freedoms that those who live in a state have.
Her real agenda is here:

But the bill’s positive aspects notwithstanding, it fails to address perhaps the most salient risk factor for troubled young people – the presence of a gun in the home. This avoidance is particularly frustrating given the scant chance that Congress will revisit the teenage suicide issue anytime soon, and the fact that it doesn’t take a brain surgeon – just a lowly editorial writer – to see a couple of common sense steps that Congress could have taken to protect kids, and didn’t take.
Firearms figure in about half of all youth suicides, and by now it is neither secret nor speculative that having a firearm at home significantly increases the chance of a depressed adolescent ending his or her own life. Nor should it come as a surprise that states with the highest rates of gun ownership also have the highest overall suicide rates.
Perhaps the most obvious way to reduce the deadly toll would be to insist that parents do a better job of locking up guns. Even as Congress was deliberating over fine print of the antisuicide bill, a telling new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Annenberg Public Policy Center appeared in the Aug. 4 Journal of the American Medical Association. This study found an 8.3 percent decrease in suicide rates among 14- to 17-year-olds in 18 states that have enacted some form of child access prevention, or C.A.P., law, making it a crime to store guns carelessly in a way that permits easy access by kids.
Why are there no provisions in the antisuicide bill creating federal incentives to encourage states without C.A.P. laws to adopt them, following the approach successfully used to nudge states to tighten their drunken driving rules? Why does the new legislation omit the simple life-saving step of requiring gun dealers to provide an effective safety lock with every weapon sold?

Let us leave aside the obvious items, that the US is a Federal State, and that those powers not specifically granted to the centre are held by the states or the people. Or that mandatory gun locks might not be the solution. Or that anybody who owns a gun and stores it carelessly is in fact an idiot. We might even overlook her elision between the 21 year old at college who commits suicide (gun locks at home would sure have solved that one eh?) and those other cases where the eight year old gets hold of the Saturday Night Special and does themselves in over test grades (if, indeed, such things ever happen).
What we should look at is the wider world. Please note that I am not stating that suicide is not a serious problem, nor that it is not horrifying when some youngster, full of all the promise life offers, is so sunk in despair that they decide to end it all. Nor am I insensitive to the pain of those they leave behind. Suicide has touched me twice in my life and I am well aware of the grief and incomprehension left behind. What irks me about this smug “lowly editorial writer” is that she seems to think that “gun control” is the answer.
The suicide rate amongst young males in the US is 21.9 per 100,000. Amongst young women, 3.8 per 100,000. Both groups have, I assume, the same access to guns with or without locks. So there might be something else than access to guns which causes the suicide rate eh?
OK, that’s a cheap shot. We all know that there is a gender imbalance in these things.
Yet what about looking at countries with either stricter gun controls than the US, or higher suicide rates? Columbia, which appears to be awash with arms (and has one of the highest murder rates in the world) has a suicide rate of 8.3 per 100,000 young males. Perhaps those who were going to kill themselves get killed before they can do so? Or Australia and Canada, both of which have notably stricter controls on handguns than the US, with rates of 24.6 and 24.7 respectively (and notably lower murder rates)? Or New Zealand, with a rate almost double the US at 39.9 per 100,000? Amazingly, it has been illegal to own a handgun there since 1974.
So, it would appear that the incidence of suicide is a slightly more complex problem that the availability of guns, or whether or not they have a lock upon them. One might even go further and state that concentrating upon gun locks as a method of reducing suicides is dishonest, perhaps even intellectually fraudulent. One might even go as far as to say that it is an attempt to undermine the Constitution on the basis of no evidence whatsoever.
We would conclude of course that this is the New York Times so we’re not actually surprised at all.