For the alcohol question, I'm actually very interested in seeing a stat of solitary drinking vs social drinking, and how it affects these statistics.

For instance I know parts of Europe still hold a very strong comraderie "pub culture." Alcohol is involved but so are strong social bonds.

The U.S has lately been making lots of quips about "wine moms" driven to sneak cheap chardonnay from the top cabinet, as well as the cliché portrayal of "working man who is so chewed up and burned out he needs a whisky and TV to sleep."

Not a fan of heavy drinking in general, but I hypothesize alcohol paired with isolation is much more likely to result in abuse and depression.

The suicide rate obviously has multiple contributing factors, but access to firearms is absolutely one of them. There's multiple studies on this that will come up in a quick web search. In general, access to anything that makes suicide more impulsive increases the suicide rate. I say this as a person who absolutely believes that access to firearms should be the default state for those that want it.

This is a myth. The suicide rate in Japan is lower than the US, and similar to European countries. South Africa, Russia, and Korea have bonkers suicide rates.

Opportunity and desire both contribute to rate. Firearms increase opportunity so more of those with desire will try. Some cultures also give more people the desire so more attempts will be made using other methods. It is not either or.

Apples and oranges. Japan has an insane work culture that leads to burnout and depression, and therefore more suicides. Not sure why Uruguay has such a high suicide rate, but they also have a completely different culture than both America and Japan. The method in which you take your life is less important if you are intent on taking your own life. Guns make it super easy.

Access to firearms increases the rate of suicide. He may have worded it poorly but the point stands. The fact that other countries have worse rates of suicide without firearms notwithstanding, because if they had access to firearms, it would be even higher.

Absolutely. Sorry for the long post because I struggle to pare it all down but:

The suicide rate AND the homicide rate is because we live in an inhuman society that, underneath all the transparent PR, is practically egging you on to "just do it already."

• It tells us that "unless you have money and power, which strip you of your humanity, you don't matter, and in fact, nothing else does either." We're then shocked when people act like psychopaths.

• Everything once held sacred is now deconstructed with the most cynical of irony, after it's been perverted and exploited for profit, of course. Traditions, communal rituals, the very concept of family, things that once held peoples together are now ridiculed and discarded.

• People see everything through the lens of a transaction, even romantic relationships, even marriages. We're encouraged to be slaves to our egos and "pursue" fleeting happiness at all costs.

• People are encouraged to see each other by their different labels, and tribe up against other labels, because that sells more plastic garbage.

• Social media empires pervade our waking lives and manipulate us into releasing a ridiculous amount of cortisol that would shock our ancestors.

• Our jobs are totalitarian dictatorships that we're forced to volunteer in so we can bother to exist within our borders of a country that is "so great and free."

• Everyone is very suspicious of everyone else. It's rude form to just go introduce yourself and talk to someone. It's harassment unless you're meeting other people through some commercialized app. If someone comes up and talks to you out of the blue, they probably have some kind of angle.

Ultimately.... Guns don't go off by themselves. We could have 10x as many guns in this country, hand em' out for free even, and, barring negligence and stupidity, suicides and homicides would still drop dramatically if people weren't constantly DARED to use them every second of their existence. On themselves, on "others."

Our media also glorifies weaponry as some kind of ultimate problem-solver. So much power to change something, ANYTHING, at the pull of a trigger. And so many people are so desperate to just affect something.

If they had access to education, care, mental wellness, actually felt like they mattered, and weren't obviously seen to just be batteries and cattle by the ones designing and "influencing" this culture. Those guns wouldn't go off nearly so often.

When we have teenagers and young adults contemplating their own deaths because a contented existence seems so out of touch and the struggle for better so hopeless, what happened??

But the conversation seems to be less "How do we make a world where people DON'T wish to kill themselves or others so often?" And more "How do we stop them from doing it?"

Which, at its most idealistic extreme, will simply produce a hell-world of limbless, miserable torso-brains with no way out of misery.

Every day we carry on and try to love our neighbors, and make anything just a bit better, and forgive our enemies, and be content with what things we own, is a radical act of defiance against the principalities and powers that feed on the cultivation of our very worst selves.

The Gym of Life

Not saying it's enough to be in the best shape of your life but it's really good for you.