Constable wrong about suicide, guns

It's official - liberals believe free will is bad for your health. Burt Constable, in his July 15 column, "A gun almost always turns a suicide attempt into suicide", quotes and paraphrases "Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck", who claims that one is more likely to commit suicide if he is the kind of person to buy a gun, i.e., because he is more likely to be one of those people who hold the conviction that, ultimately, they are "the masters of their own fates." How reassuring to know that the people who want to run this country - the people who are currently running Congress and, if recent judicial rulings are any indication, the highest court in the nation - fundamentally agree with those who believe that human independence is merely a pathological state of mind.

All the statistics Mr. Constable can list, and all the airhead, anti-freedom "experts" he can quote, will never prove his theory: that guns are the primary cause of high suicide rates in this country. Guns are a means to an end, whether that end is self-defense or self-destruction. Any correlation between gun rights and high suicide rates is only a correlation, a symptom of the disease, and not the disease itself. The disease is the culturally pervasive belief that man is a tool for society to employ, to use and to abuse; that he is expendable and hardly worth defending or championing; that he is only as valuable as his government decides he is. To take away a man's self-worth is to erase his reason to live, to obscure the moral nature and consequences of such a horrendous mistake as suicide. Regardless of what crackpot liberals would like to believe, people are definitely "the masters of their own fates." A nation's government, and its citizens, should never treat the integrity of human choice and free will as anything but axiomatic.

Brendan Moore

Naperville