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I have been out less than a year.
I don't think it's as bad as you think. I know plenty who are still in who would go against an unlawful order.
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Range Suicide @ Bob's Tactical In Salisbury
- Thread starter Zappa
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I don't think it's as bad as you think. I know plenty who are still in who would go against an unlawful order.
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Have you ever served? Where? When? We (gun lovers) are not some minority in the military. The majority of people in the military own guns. I mean I was a NUKE - nothing in my rating had anything to do with guns and a ton of us had guns at home. We even qualified watches that were not our responsibility just so we could get training with and handle some cool tools (toys).
I wouldn't go that far. I know some people who served who never touched a gun after they left the service... and most of the ones I know who have guns had them before they went in. It probably changes drastically depending on your MOS and all that, but a blanket statement of "military people have more guns at home on average" is bogus on its face. It would be like saying the same thing about police officers. You take some big city department and there are maybe 5% of the guys on the street are "gun persons", you go to some small town and 80% of them might be gun guys. The demographic is all over the map.
-Mike
Yes and no. We don't have "LTCs" per se, but we have Pistol/Revolver licenses, but as you already know, it's just to carry concealed or to carry loaded in a motor vehicle.
EMTDAD
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Maybe I was lucky and served with a lot of like minded individuals about protecting ourselves and family... It was the same for my Department at two different commands. Norfolk, Newport News, Hampton, Va Beach are not the safest of places anymore...
If they have their own gun they're just going to do it at home or go in the woods and do it rather than do it in public.
Has it happened before? Probably... but if you interviewed any guy that ran a pay range for a long time and asked them "How many times has someone committed suicide with their own gun here?" Chances are pretty reliable the answer would be "Zero."
-Mike
Enzo
NES Member
If you have your own gun I think you're less likely to go to a shooting range, pay for a lane and then commit suicide.....
<thread hijack mode=on>
Absolutely. It is a very difficult problem.
Even for diseases where there are objective measures that can be used to determine the effectiveness of a treatment (for example, blood pressure or cholesterol), medications that are effective for some people aren't effective for another. When it comes to mental illness, the subjective nature of the diagnosis and the difficulty in determining whether they are better or worse (and if they are better, whether that was caused by the medication or other factors) makes it very, very difficult to find a treatment that "works".
Some years back, the Boston Globe ran an article with a headline that read something like "St. John's Work Ineffective in Treating Depression." When I read the text of the article, it said that the study compared St. John's Wort, Prozac, and a placebo. IIRC, the percentage of the people that got better were around 27% for St. John's Wort, 30% for Prozac, and 37% for the placebo. The title of the article certainly isn't what I would take away from the study.
![[thinking]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/010.gif "Thinking [thinking]")
A while back I was at a lecture given by an academic concerning a new cancer medication in Phase 1 clinical trials. It was a double-blind study with two arms, medication versus placebo. The first patient to drop out of the study due to intolerable side effects was on the placebo arm.
A lot of studies even in high profile journals are best suited to lining the bottom of a bird cage. Several years ago, I was at a lecture that concerned how the sample selection process itself can doom research to failure. The point was that many scientists think about how to structure their "experiment" to eliminate bias without realizing that the "experiment" starts with sample selection, before they ever start working in the lab. The example he used was a journal article that he read concerning a genetic marker for prostate cancer. The article claimed that the authors had found a genetic marker in blood that definitively diagnosed whether or not a patient had prostate cancer, and that it had a 100% detection rate, with no false positives or false negatives. This sort of thing is something of a Holy Grail, as the PSA test for prostate cancer is a horrid test (lots of false positives and false negatives). Shortly after the article was published, the researchers formed a company to commercialize the test and raised a bunch of venture capital money.
The claim of 100% detection rate immediately set off his BS detector -- no medical test ever works that well. He obtained the data and began looking at it. The study had two cohorts -- prostate cancer versus "normal". The study compared gene expression of those with prostate cancer versus those without prostate cancer ("normals"). It didn't take him too long to find the problem. The participants in the prostate cancer cohort were age mid-50s on average and were all male. The participants in the normal cohort were age mid-30s and about 1/2 were women. Including women participants in a prostate cancer study is kind of like including male participants in an ovarian cancer study -- women don't have prostates and men don't have ovaries. The researchers ran their experiment into the ditch at the very start by screwing up their sample selection. Their experiment found something different in gene expression between the two cohorts, but that difference probably wasn't due to prostate cancer. The company that they created was never heard from again.
Another example of how difficult it is to determine the effectiveness of treatment. The FDA requires new cancer medications to be "better" than existing medications in order to be approved. What is "better"? It would seem obvious that the best measure of which treatment is "better" is whether patients on the new treatment live longer. How do you define whether people live longer? One current standard is the 5-year survival rate -- what percentage of the patients are alive 5-years after they are diagnosed. This would seem relatively straight-forward, but let's consider it more closely. Suppose there is a cancer that kills its patients between 1 and 5 years after it is diagnosed. The 5-year survival rate is 0%. Now suppose that a new test allows for diagnosis 5-years earlier than the current test, but that the treatments don't change the course of the disease. A person that was previously diagnosed at age 30 would die between ages 31 and 35; now they are diagnosed at age 25, but still die between ages 31 and 35. The patient outcome is no better, but the 5-year survival rate has gone from 0% to 100%. Still think that the 5-year survival rate is a good yardstick?
This stuff is really, really hard for diseases with objective measures. For diseases with subjective measures like mental illness, it is even harder.
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If they have their own gun, they aren't going to go to a range and rent one. They will commit suicide in private somewhere. And if they want to commit suicide, they aren't going to bring a friend with them.
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No names yet? Im from Beverly hoping this isnt someone I know howver im doubdting it since it sounds like the guy wasnt a gun person and Im pretty sure everyone I know is. Alot of interesting comments I can see both sides of the argument but I highly doubt this guys priorities while making his final thoughts were the RKBA and gun range etiquette, maybe he was afraid of heights,didnt have access to pills and there arent many people who survive a suicide by gun attempt, because failing at suicide and ending up paralyzed would be worse than suicide imo.
Dont even have to pay for a lane. POC there.
PaulR
NES Member
Well.
I didn't stay at a holiday inn last night, but my brother did kill himself 3 months ago.
Went out in the woods and hung himself.
I kept my guns locked up tight.
It was a lifelong depression, like hardcore depression, not this sh!t you see on TV.
He was 52, in retrospect we're sorta happy he made it as far as he did.
My analysis:
The system sucks, doctors don't know shit and dont care, they shuffle you through the system.
This guy (at the range) was looking for a quick way to do it, this is what he found.
If he wanted his name in the national news he would have done something a lot different, and in my mind that's not depression, that's some sort of unclassified mental-fawked-upness along with a side salad of depression.
I didn't stay at a holiday inn last night, but my brother did kill himself 3 months ago.
Went out in the woods and hung himself.
I kept my guns locked up tight.
It was a lifelong depression, like hardcore depression, not this sh!t you see on TV.
He was 52, in retrospect we're sorta happy he made it as far as he did.
My analysis:
The system sucks, doctors don't know shit and dont care, they shuffle you through the system.
This guy (at the range) was looking for a quick way to do it, this is what he found.
If he wanted his name in the national news he would have done something a lot different, and in my mind that's not depression, that's some sort of unclassified mental-fawked-upness along with a side salad of depression.
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The other problem with mental health is there is this delta between people who are self aware and those that aren't, and there is a mismash of garbage in the middle. For example joe smoe is depressed but how much of that is caused by his own doing (eg, crappy behaviors leading to crappy results and making someone unhappy) vs "joe blows brain chemicals are chronically unbalanced and there's little he can do without pills". etc. Then there is the issue of having millions of people on medication for things that are probably marginal issues; and in some cases the medication can make them worse, or "make them better most of the time, but when they have an episode it's worse" etc, etc, ad nauseam.
There's also the controversial issue WRT suicide as to whether or not this sort of thing can be predicted, and I think an answer is, in a lot of cases, the one that people don't want to hear- No. -and that with certain people, there is not a damned thing you can do to stop them from doing it. A common theme I hear in most of these cases from the people who surrounded the person who offed themselves is things like "We never saw it coming".
Big problem, these days, with mental health is stigmatization. With government tentacles getting into everything, and patient privacy not being protected in a lot of cases, many people are far from eager to see any kind of help- for fear that it will trigger something bad happening on the other side of the fence, eg, WRT their employer, family members finding out about it, etc. While there is this "attention whore suicide chump" contingent that's eager to tell everyone else about their issues, there are a shitload of people who are ashamed of their issues and go through great lengths to hide it all from everyone else.
-Mike
Mike nailed it ^^^^
Yup, it is still an issue. For example, the FAA will take away your pilot's license if you are taking an antidepressant. How many airline pilots out there do you think have untreated depression as a result? Would you rather have a depressed pilot get treatment or avoid treatment because he will lose his job as a result?
WallHack
Banned
Its not a joke, but he was completely within his rights to commit suicide.
Its just sad that his chosen method may cost a local firearms business a lot of time and money.
Agreed on the business portion. But, suicide does not make death any less tragic.
D
Deleted member 22390
i was there a couple months ago, buying a 642 and some of the people that walked in not to be racist or anything like that but they looked like gang bangers trying to get some range time to perfect there drive by skills, and when they would walk in and got a hold of a rental gun i slowly moved my hand towards my glock under my shirt and looked over at the guy helping me and he was doing the same!
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I go there a lot for my ammo because it's close by and pretty cheap. However, every time I go in there I get scared. A public shooting range is just an accident waiting to happen. I believe this is the second time someone has done this in the past few years, they had this occur a few years ago too.
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People in the Military are not just like LEO's. They are not on our streets enforcing any Laws. Members of the Military are abiding by all LAWFUL orders of officers appointed over them. There is a code of conduct and a Uniform Code of Military Justice - think of it as a whole second court system that members and former members of the Military can be held accountable to.
The majority of people in the military are Enlisted. As of 2010, there was ~ 1.4 Million active duty members, out of that 1.1 million were enlisted.
~22 Million of the ~300 Million in the US are Veterans of our Armed Forced. So, by those numbers, just a little less than 1 out of every 10 people you meet or see is a Veteran. Are there that many people telling you what to do day in and day out?
What you fail to understand is that the majority of the military are also, gasp, people on the streets - abiding by all the same Laws - just held to a stricter code of conduct. Members of the Military are not LEO's, they are civilians just like you. They just receive orders from the Government. There are Laws about what the Military can and cannot do. They are your neighbors. Some smoke pot, some do drugs, some are criminals and some hate authority just as much as you show you.
Your generalization is pathetic and ridiculous.
He was from Beverly, wasn't a gun guy, been married six months, great guy, been under stress at work, may have been on meds, the family will be making a statement to the press.
About an three hours ago I had a customer freaking out on his phone, when he hung up he told me a kid he'd grown up with had just died and was trying to find out more. I asked if he was 32 and from Beverly and he said yes. I told him what happened at Bob's and he said, no that couldn't be him, he wasn't a gun guy. 45 minutes later, he asked how I knew about the gun range indecent, and I showed him the Salem News on my computer. It was his friend, very sad.
About an three hours ago I had a customer freaking out on his phone, when he hung up he told me a kid he'd grown up with had just died and was trying to find out more. I asked if he was 32 and from Beverly and he said yes. I told him what happened at Bob's and he said, no that couldn't be him, he wasn't a gun guy. 45 minutes later, he asked how I knew about the gun range indecent, and I showed him the Salem News on my computer. It was his friend, very sad.
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This.Hey, same experiences here, none of the Nuke officers I know are nearly as nerdy and one track minded as people would think based on their education level/subject areas. I'm friends with about 20 junior officers in the Nuke community and most of them could talk longer about guns and shooting than I could.
In the aviation community, all we do is shoot, ride motorcycles, shoot, drink, other outdoor activities, shoot, study a little and do our jobs when its time. We are not plotting to take away rights or confiscate lawfully owned property and most of us want to avoid the JBTs to the same extent as anyone else does. We jump through the same hoops and deal with the same laws everyone else does (the laws that LEOs get a pass on) in order to practice our hobbies. Nobody likes it, nobody agrees with it.
My lack of good faith and respect for many (not all) in the LEO profession comes from the fact that they are not held to very high standards and consistently get away with crap that would have me out of a job and working at McDonalds. Then they go around expecting to be treated like the .mil, act like they are in the .mil, dress like they are in the .mil and want tens of thousands of dollars in .mil equipment to do their jobs.
Maybe our experiences in the Navy are just anomalies or anecdotes and we are not actually seeing and experiencing what we think we are.
Usually, I pretty much agree completely with everything that comes out of your mouth but I have to disagree with you here.
The military is not a statistically random sample representation of the US population. There was a recent article about this. Most people in the .mil come from the southern or western US and, more broadly, RURAL areas. This is true from published studies as well as anecdotaly, ask anyone from the north who has served how many southern accents they were around at any given time. Ask how many people were from middle of nowhere towns vs major cities.
You are making the same mistake newgunguy is in comparing us to the cops. Trust me, Ive met 1 or 2 people in the military that I could legitimately say knew nothing about guns and had no interest, thats it. Take my OCS class for example a few years back, we had 33 in our company and every single person owned more than 1 gun and every single person had a CCW permit of some type, the majority had multiple CCW permits covering multiple states. People who go through the effort to carry as much as possible where ever they can I would describe as more than the "casual" IDGAF gun owner.
Boil it down, the military breaks shit and kills people. Yes we do some really nice things for a lot of people/countries in between but thats basically what the institution is designed to do. Do you think it attracts many people with no interest in firearms and things that go bang? The cops have a completely different mission but apparently fewer and fewer are getting that memo.
![[rolleyes]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/042.gif "Roll Eyes [rolleyes]")
Someone give this Man some Rep for me...
Lip
Army Veteran
The shithead did it in public where someone else had to clean up his remains. Pretty damn insensitive himself. Fhim. Let him rot.
