Stopping Suicide, With Help From the Local Gun Shop

Ralph Demicco was standing behind the counter at Riley’s Sport Shop in New Hampshire one Saturday morning when a woman walked in and came right up to the counter.

“Almost immediately she pointed to a firearm at the counter and said, ‘I’d like to buy that gun,’ ” Demicco remembers. “And that just sets off alarm bells."

Most customers would browse, ask to see a few different models, ask questions.

“I said to her, ‘Ma’am, should you really be buying this gun?’ ” Demicco recalls now.

The woman started crying. Demicco took her into the back office to talk.

“She had been released from a mental health facility that morning,” he said. “Didn’t feel like she was ready to go.”

Demicco has lots of stories like this from his 40 years owning the gun shop. At one point, he got a call from a public health researcher who studies suicides. She told him that three people, over the course of a week, had bought firearms from his store and killed themselves.

“To say I was speechless is an understatement,” he says.

Demicco is skeptical of public health types, and worries they have hidden agendas. But after hearing about those suicides, he decided to join forces with the researchers to form the New Hampshire Firearms Safety Coalition. They developed a prevention campaign, but one that was rooted in gun culture.

Demicco traveled across New Hampshire and asked gun dealers to put up a poster in their stores. It shows two people, one of them clearly in distress, and the other lending a comforting hand. The message, Demicco says, was “Friends don’t let friends hurt themselves.”

It's similar to the “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk” campaigns of the '80s. The idea was to raise awareness of suicide risk factors among gun enthusiasts, so they could look out for one another.

“If Uncle Harry is getting a divorce and is distraught over it and he has firearms, you need to step up to the plate, you need to be the one,” Demicco says. “It’s OK to intervene.”

In the last several years since then, firearm clubs have partnered with health experts in 20 states to adopt the New Hampshire Firearms Safety Coalition’s campaign.

Shasta County Gun Shop Owners

Public health officials in Shasta County, in the far northern reaches of California, were among the first to approach gun shop owners for help. They say there are similarities in Shasta County with New Hampshire, when it comes to suicide trends and a pro-gun culture.

"We have a high number of firearm suicides,” says Katie Cassidy, who spearheaded the project for the county Health and Human Services Department in 2008. “We’re a very rural community, we have a lot of hunters. So taking a traditional approach, like ‘Wear your seatbelt,’ didn’t go over very well.”

Instead, the department took the New Hampshire approach and partnered with firearm dealers and law enforcement, asking them what kind of messaging would work, and asking them to review brochure drafts.

“As soon as we took the approach of curiosity, rather than coming into the discussion with an opinion,” Cassidy says, “that opened a lot of dialogue that hadn’t been at the table before.”

At the Olde West Gun & Loan in Redding, some impressive stuffed deer heads and wild pigs line the walls. General manager Richard Howell demonstrates some of the merchandise responsible for these trophies.

“Bolt-action rifles, lever-action rifles, .22s,” he says, pointing to the rows of weapons in the case. He opens the port of a pump-action shotgun.

“Load it,” he says, closing the chamber, “take it out in the field, hunt.”

The local sheriff and health department are now asking shop owners like Howell to put some new versions of the brochures on their sales counters. Howell looks over a draft.

“These are the 10 commandments of gun safety,” Howell observes, chewing a piece of frost-blue gum while he scans the pamphlet. “Now 11. OK, they’ve added 11.”

Virtually all kids and new shooters learn about the 10 commandments of gun safety. The brochure boldly adds an 11th: knowing the signs of suicidal behavior and helping friends store their guns outside the home during an emotional crisis.

“Well ...,” Howell says uneasily. “Now we’re going to be the gun safety psychologists? I’m not trained for that.”

He’s not sure the “friends don’t let friends drive drunk” philosophy really works with guns. He says the difference is that driving is a privilege, while owning a gun is a right.

But Howell says he can understand why Shasta County is trying this. If the sheriff just wants him to leave a pile of brochures on the counter, it's no problem. And if someone were to ask him to store a firearm at the shop, he would be OK with that.

“We wouldn’t be against that,” he says. “If someone takes a pamphlet home and it saves one life, then it’s done its job.”