“I don’t think that the gun had anything to do with it,” Davis said.
Yet, research shows that easy access to a firearm can be deadly.
“There’s a lot of factors leading to this epidemic, but the most important one is guns,” said Chris Marvin, who served for seven years as a U.S. Army officer and Black Hawk helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. He currently sits on the Everytown Veterans Advisory Council.
“It’s so clear that the gun is a leading reason why we have a suicide crisis.”
When people think about suicide among veterans, Marvin said, they tend to blame it on the trauma of combat. But many veterans, like Johnson, never saw any fighting.
Young Missouri military veterans suicide rate exceptionally high news-leader.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from news-leader.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Fast Facts
To help address the growing rate of military suicides, DOD provides clinical treatment such as medication to servicemembers. DOD has also implemented various non-clinical suicide prevention efforts, such as distributing gun locks and providing suicide awareness training.
How are these non-clinical interventions working? In short, DOD assesses its entire suicide prevention program, but hasn t assessed all of the efforts individually. Each one should be assessed for effectiveness and to identify potential improvements.
We recommended developing a process to ensure that individual non-clinical suicide prevention efforts are assessed.
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What GAO Found
The Department of Defense (DOD) has a variety of suicide prevention efforts that are implemented by the military services (Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps). These include clinical prevention efforts that are generally focused on individual patient treatment and interventions, as well as non-clinical
Military suicides in COVID era hit a new high
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Mayra Beltran /Chronicle
Suicides across the armed services rose sharply in the first year of the coronavirus, hitting a record 571 deaths in 2020, but a Pentagon official and others say the stress of the pandemic isn’t the likely culprit.
Just what is behind the steady rise during years of Defense Department efforts to reduce self-inflicted deaths baffles experts, a mystery nowhere near being solved.
The latest mark, released in a report last week, was above the 503 suicides recorded in 2019 and the previous record of 543 set in 2018. It pushed the total since 2003 past the number of troops killed in action or accidents in Iran and Afghanistan, 7,038.
Military Deaths by Suicide Jumped 25% at End of 2020 military.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from military.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.