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4. THE SUICIDAL

The gun’s bitter role in suicide – a filmed moment of despair – a dark pilgrimage to the scene of a tragedy in New York, USA – talking to an American psychologist and learning from Sylvia Plath – Switzerland – meeting a suicide charity by the shores of Lake Geneva – and an unexpected discovery

According to the World Health Organization, over 800,000 die every year from suicide, in all of its despairing forms.¹ This works out at about one person taking their life every forty seconds. What it means is that more people kill themselves each year than are killed by homicides and wars combined, and suicide is one of the leading causes of death among teenagers and adults under thirty-five.²

Of this mountain of dead, firearm suicides account for a huge number. Exact figures are hard to come by, but the general observation is that where guns are very common you often find a higher level of suicide deaths by that method. None more so than in the US, where more people shoot themselves than anywhere else in the world – 60 per cent of all suicides are by this method.³ It works out, on average, at about fifty gun suicides every day.⁴

Of course, there is no such thing as one ‘America’ when it comes to statistics; there are major regional differences. Alaska has a firearm suicide rate 700 per cent higher than New Jersey.⁵ But what we do know is that shooting yourself is becoming much more common there. The percentage of US gun suicides has increased from about 35 per cent of all suicides in the 1920s to over half today.⁶ And what shocks are the quiet lines in the US data. Like the cold figures that record there were ninety-two children under the age of fourteen who shot themselves in 2011.⁷

Comparing such figures to other developed nations highlights what an unaddressed problem the US has. In England and Wales gun suicides account for less than 2 per cent of all suicides.⁸ In Latin America and the Caribbean only 13 per cent of the 26,213 suicides in 2012 were with guns.⁹

Given the high level of firearm ownership there, this observation of the US as a gun suicide outlier is in line with the oft-stated link between rates of firearm ownership and suicides.¹⁰ In fact, so strong is this link that one way the Small Arms Survey establish levels of gun ownership in a country ‘is the proportion of suicides committed with firearms’.¹¹ So it is no surprise that the US has a firearm-suicide rate almost six times higher than most developed nations.¹²

This was why, some months before I went to South Africa and on my way back from Honduras, I had stopped over in New York. There I had travelled deep into the heart of the city to visit a place that had stayed with me ever since I had begun researching the gun’s role in suicides: 1358 Washington Avenue.

The east coast wind pushed down the wide street, and clumps of fallen leaves danced in tight circles. Distant police sirens coughed out ugly staccatos across the city, and the winter sun bleached its low-covering sky. I parked my cheap rental car behind a scuffed brown Ford, a Dominican flag limply displayed in its stained rear window, and opened the door.

In front of me was a twenty-storey high, dull brown-brick tower. Bland and architecturally functional, this was one of the Projects, built in the mid 1960s to house some of the poor and the huddled masses of the greatest nation on earth. It was named after Governor Morris, a founding father by whose hand the American Constitution was written. And it was one of ten similar blocks, housing over 3,000 people, here in the Bronx. It was not the nice side of town.

Autumn had reached these streets weeks before, and the rough grass outside the building lay coated with curling leaves. A sweatshirt and a pair of tights draped the sparse limbs of skeletal trees and flapped in the wind like flags of poverty. Coffee cups scuttled around on gritty gusts, and squirrels darted up and down the encrusted bark of the trees.

Ten years ago, Paris Lane, a troubled twenty-two-year-old, had killed himself here in the foyer of this block. Paris had imagined himself alone, but a NYPD surveillance camera was the unblinking eye that saw him talking to – and, it was later to be said, being rejected by – his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Krystin Simmons. It captured the wiping of tears from eyes and her hugging the young man with his lank hair braids and his black, dull puffer jacket.

And it saw what happened next.

Krystin walked into the lift and the metal doors closed. Paris then, with a casualness that belied what happened next, put a balled hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out a handgun. He put the pistol in his mouth.

A life was extinguished, and the CCTV camera carried on filming.

It would have ended there, but that grainy video was to find its way onto a website called Liveleak.com, one that specialises in videos of people dying, often killing themselves. Liveleak has videos of people jumping off buildings or stepping before trains. It has a few videos of men, and it is only men, even pulling the trigger. They had posted this particular film under the line ‘An Oldie but a Goodie’. So it was that over half a million people watched the ending of this man’s life, and I was one of them.

The watching of a suicide played out on video is a terrible and compelling thing. You see the sudden jerk of death as the bullet rips life away, then you rewind to the point of the last breath and you pause right at that moment when life is extinguished.

These things leave digital ghosts in our mind, the grandest and most terrible of gestures. And Paris’s death had haunted.

I think the seeming nonchalance with which he took his life was the thing that left its mark. The casual way he went from hugging his girlfriend to pulling out a gun. So I had travelled to this rundown district to see if I could put some meaning to his sudden end.

I walked up the path and entered the foyer. I had already been here, in a sense. It was the same, a decade on. The scuffed municipal floor, the grey metal light, the lift doors. A man in a tightly wound-down hooded top walked in. Did he know Paris? He did not answer me. Then a young African American woman came in, but she was also silent. This area had seen too much violence for people to start talking to a white guy with a notepad, so I walked back out into the wind.

School was breaking up, and, as I retraced my steps down the weed-ripped pathway, a fight broke out. The kids crowded around, screaming and jostling. A white teacher – all of the children were black – strode over, and there was a sharp bark of rebuke. The children dispersed, their laughing, pecking voices causing birds to take flight.

An older man, solid and confident, with a flat cap and tattoos, his poodle on a leash, walked past. I asked if he remembered the shooting.

‘Oh. That cat. Yeah, it was shocking,’ he said. ‘I had a friend who was downstairs when it happened – there was blood all over the floor. Like it was fake, you know. But the girl, the girl just carried on upstairs and didn’t know. It’s still being talked about.’

His name was Wayne Newton. He had lived here for forty years, ever since he was eight, and ran a barber shop down the way. It used to be crazy around here. A person like myself hanging around back then – and he pointed a finger at me and mimed pulling the trigger. I asked more about Paris.

‘Yeah. You hear about him even now. “Have you seen what’s on the internet? Some cat shot himself in the Projects.” They don’t realise he did this ten years ago.’

Paris had lived a hard life. His parents had both died of AIDS by the time he was twelve. He was an aspiring rapper who used the name Paradice. But Wayne did not know much more and so he shook my hand and told me he had a 9mm gun for himself because, hell, you needed it here once. Then his dog saw a squirrel and shivered with excitement and pulled at the leash, and Wayne was gone.

I walked the streets, around and around, the apartment block at my centre, asking if people remembered the lonely death. But Wayne was the only one who had heard of this young man, or was saying he had, at least. The mothers in the children’s after-hours playgroup, each wall lined with rainbows, clicked their tongues and said they knew nothing. The police stood outside the school gates, guns on their hips and suspicion on their minds, and crossed their arms. They asked me why I was asking such questions, and I walked away from them as if guilty of something.

The woman at the housing association gave me the telephone number of a press officer on a slip of torn paper. I crunched it into a small ball and let it drop into a bin. Press officers don’t talk about such things. And I walked back out into the fading evening and watched the flight of lonely city birds as they sliced through the air in a solitary dance and realised that Paris’s name was long lost to these streets. His death was so famous and yet so forgotten in the very place where he died.

A slice of time can be a saving grace when it comes to thinking about suicide. One study of survivors of self-inflicted gunshot wounds in the US found 40 per cent had contemplated suicide for less than five minutes beforehand.¹³

Such a rapid shift in emotions means one thing: that the way someone chooses to end their life is important. If someone reaches for a gun, they usually don’t get a second chance. If they reach for pills, they often do. Over 99 per cent of people shooting themselves in the head die, whereas only 6 per cent of people slashing their wrists or popping pills end up killing themselves.¹⁴ And it’s been shown, repeatedly, that those who survive a suicide attempt usually don’t later die by suicide.

This link between the availability of means of killing yourself and the chances of a successful suicide is powerfully illustrated in the way that the American-born poet Sylvia Plath ended her life in the UK. Sylvia, despairing of the lifelong depression that had hounded her for thirty years, which she called ‘owl’s talons clenching my heart’, killed herself in 1963. In the velvet quiet of the morning she had taken sheets of tin foil and handfuls of wetted tea towels and lined the doors and windows of her kitchen, so as to protect her sleeping children next door. Then she put her head in the oven and turned on the gas. By 4.40 a.m. Sylvia Plath had escaped the weight of her darkness.

At the time ovens in England used coal gas; something that contained carbon monoxide in a lethal dose. In the late 1950s, so easy was it to stick your head in the oven in England nearly half of all suicides were gas deaths, some 2,500 a year. Seeing the problem, the government acted, and soon gas companies stopped using poisonous coal gas. What was known as the ‘execution chamber in everyone’s kitchen’ was removed.

What did the suicidal do instead? It seems most carried on living. England’s suicide rate dropped precipitously by one-third and then stayed at that level.¹⁵ Many of those who gassed themselves apparently did so impulsively. As Scott Anderson wrote in a New York Times article: ‘In a moment of deep despair or rage or sadness, they turned to what was easy and quick and deadly.’ Removing the oven slowed the process down; an accessible exit from the agony of despair became suddenly less so.¹⁶

If this is true for gas ovens, then why not for guns? Studies have shown that just keeping a gun unloaded and storing its ammunition in a different room significantly reduces the odds of that gun being used in a suicide; it seems that there was some correlation between access and lethal action. So I contacted one of America’s leading experts on suicide – Paul Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University – to find out more. We spoke over a crackling line, but what he said was clear.

‘There is probably no psychiatrist who couldn’t tell you they know patients who have thought about ending their lives,’ he said, his voice dipping in and out on the call, ‘who then, with the treatment for depression or alcoholism or whatever, went on to live thirty or forty years without a recurrence of that kind of suicidal ideation. Suicidal ideation is often situation-specific and often transient.’

He talked about the people who throw themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco – one of the world’s most popular sites for suicides. The bridge stands 75 metres above the cold water of the Frisco bay. After a fall of four seconds, jumpers hit the surging surface at 75 miles an hour, a speed that usually breaks their backs. Over 95 per cent of the jumpers die from the drop alone, the rest from drowning or hypothermia. The chances of dying are about as sure as using a gun, so the bridge attracts those who see a flying death being better than a blood-splattered one, with a peak of ten suicides there in one month alone.

‘Years ago, back in the late ’70s, a professor at Berkley collected information regarding over 500 people who attempted to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge but were restrained,’ Paul went on. ‘He found the vast majority, almost 90 per cent of them, were still alive twenty-five years later, and only about 5 per cent had subsequently committed suicide, 5 per cent dying of natural causes. OK, the rate of suicide was higher than the general population, but 90 per cent of them were still alive an average of a quarter of a century later.’

His words made me think about Paris. Was it inevitable he was going to kill himself? If he had not been able to get a gun, would he have wandered down to the dark, slick spread of the Hudson River and drowned himself instead? Or would he have waited for the next lift to the top floor and thrown himself into the yielding air and felt, for a brief second, like he was flying?

These were questions that I had sought an answer to, not in the US, but back when I was in Switzerland visiting the Small Arms Survey. That was because there I had found other data worth exploring. Not about the numbers of guns, but about the numbers of suicides by them.

After leaving the Small Arms Survey, I had walked back out into Geneva and followed the tramlines south, passing the quiet classical façades that line its neat streets and from there crossed the slow-pushing waters of the Rhône onto the Boulevard Georges-Favon. The sky was a peppered grey, and genteel apartments rose on each side. I carried on until I reached a place where the air was filled with the chaos of crossing cable-car wires and the roads filled with bookshops and Chinese tea merchants.

A sun-frayed shop window caught my eye; a Dungeons and Dragons store. Fantasy and comics do well here, because the Swiss seemingly enjoy such subtle distractions along with chocolates and fancy timepieces. There, in the window, a yellowing box stood: ‘Descente: Voyage dans les ténèbres’. It was a game that led you down into the shadow-lands and beyond. It seemed apt.

Around the corner, opposite a café selling bitter coffees and neatly stacked pastries, was my destination: Stop Suicide. It was a charity set up to help young people at risk. Sophie Lochet, a conscientious woman in her mid twenties, met me at the door wearing a white shirt, blue jeans and a pair of glasses that framed a kind face. She beckoned me into a room filled with reports and posters, campaign leaflets and books with depressing titles. I settled down amid offers of coffee and chocolate.

‘In Switzerland, every day, about four people will take their lives,’ she said. Over a thousand a year. ‘That’s three times more than die in road accidents.’ She explained the role that guns play in this.

Switzerland has one of the highest number of guns per household in the world. This small landlocked state, high on the west-central plains of Europe, has almost 3.5 million firearms in a population of just 8 million, leaving almost 40 per cent of Swiss households with one.¹⁷ This, she said, had led to guns being one of the leading ways of suicide among young men caught between the volatile ages of fifteen and twenty-nine.¹⁸

One reason for this, Sophie explained, was that – until recently – Swiss conscripted soldiers were allowed to keep their rifles with them after they had completed their military duties. About 40 per cent of gun suicides here were at the end of an army-issued weapon. In 2003, though, the number of Swiss soldiers was halved as a result of a sweeping army reform. This sudden decline in the armed forces meant there was a parallel decrease in the availability of guns nationwide.

This was why I had come to see Sophie. I wanted to understand if this drop in guns had resulted in fewer suicides, to see if those who say, ‘There is no correlation between gun control laws and murder or suicide rates,’ were right.¹⁹ I wanted to challenge what the pro-gun lobbyists would argue: that ‘denying one particular means to people who are motivated to commit suicide . . . simply pushes them to some other means’.²⁰

Sophie had the answer. ‘One study did look at the gun suicide numbers before and after that reform. The academics found there was a major reduction, both in the overall suicide rate and also in the firearm suicide rate.’ The evidence, she said, was compelling. Echoing what Paul Appelbaum had told me, only 22 per cent of the reduction in firearm suicides was substituted by other ways of killing oneself. Like the coal gas situation in the UK, a drop in access to guns in Switzerland was not followed by a rise in other forms of suicide. Rather, it led to an enduring drop in the general suicide rate. Today in Switzerland there are about 200 gun suicides per year. Two decades ago it was about 400.²¹

Switzerland is not the only place this sort of cause and effect has been seen. I later read that in 2006 the Israeli Defence Force witnessed a disturbing number of suicides in its ranks. In an effort to bring down this number, the IDF banned soldiers from taking rifles home on the weekends. Suicides fell by 40 per cent. An army review concluded: ‘decreasing access to firearms significantly decreases rates of suicide among adolescents’.²²

In Australia, too, a series of strict gun control laws in the mid 1990s led to a decrease in gun suicides, but with no significant rise in other types of suicides.²³ These findings are in line with a host of studies that have found, again and again, that stricter gun laws are associated with lower gun suicide rates.²⁴

Yet, in the US, where about 20,000 people die every year from suicide by guns, the political classes seem inured to such observations, and pro-gun advocates deny any correlation between access to guns and suicides. The lobbyists, most notably the National Rifle Association, conclude fatalistically that gun owners ‘exhibit a willingness to take definitive action when they believe it to be in their own self-interest. Such action may include ending their own life when the time is deemed appropriate.’²⁵ They do not take into account the influence of mental illness on gun suicide.

But Sophie was convinced. Guns cause suicides. Of course, other sorrows play their part. Suicides are driven by depression, loneliness and broken hearts, but guns help transform a moment of crisis into a final act.

And yet firearm suicides somehow are still seen as inevitable and unstoppable. Or they are called something else entirely – an accident, a gun discharge. I had read that in some countries, gun suicides are under-reported by as much as 100 per cent.²⁶ It was like that with Ernest Hemingway, a man long beset by depression. He had ‘accidentally killed himself while cleaning a gun this morning’, according to his wife.²⁷ But we know what really happened. We know even without the New York Times pointing out that Hemingway was ‘an expert on firearms’, or that his father had taken his own life with a Civil War pistol.

Such reluctance to admit that suicide occurs, to address the things that contribute to it, such as gun availability, stems, it seemed to me, from the idea that taking your own life goes against nature and God, a view long held in Anglo-Saxon society.

‘Self-murder’ became a crime in England in the mid thirteenth century, while the term ‘to commit suicide’ reflected the Catholic Church’s view of the act as sinful. Suicide victims were once denied a Christian burial, dragged to a crossroads under the cloak of night and there thrown in a pit, a wooden stake hammered through their hearts. There were no clergy, choir or prayers. The family was even stripped of their belongings, which were given to the Crown. In this way, the suicide of an adult male once could have reduced his survivors to poverty.²⁸

Even today, in some parts of the world, suicide is still illegal. In India, you could, until 2014, have faced up to one-year imprisonment for trying to shoot yourself. You can still be sent to prison for attempting to kill yourself in Ghana, Singapore and Uganda. Internationally, we still have a social disgust for suicide as well as an institutional refusal to respond to it. No wonder it is rarely talked about when it comes to gun control.

I thought of this as I watched the video of Paris Lane’s death once again. Half a million people might watch his death, but nothing changes. No campaign is launched, and sympathy remains muted. Such is the power of the gun and the silent powerlessness of those in despair. The gun not only transforms these people’s decision in taking their lives, but it also transforms our response to their deaths.

The comments below Paris’s video revealed this: ‘That man was weak and let his infatuation for a woman overpower his rationale,’ wrote one.

‘The hell is waiting you idiot,’ added another.

Some were just ugly: ‘If all blacks did the same America will be a safe place to live.’

But then I saw a comment that surprised me.

Someone had written: ‘They didn’t break up u fools . . . He had problems with some bad guys and they hunted him. He went home to his mom and gf to say goodbye then killed himself so they wont kill his family and friends . . .’

In reading this, my view of Paris Lane’s suicide changed. Perhaps his death was more a response to power than to pain, I thought. And in so thinking, the gun took me down a path that led away from those impacted by guns, towards those who wield them.