In region of guns and suicide, outreach seeks to curb deaths

MONTROSE, Colo. -- Keith Carey is a gunsmith in Montrose, a town with a frontier flavor set amid the mesas of western Colorado. He's a staunch, though soft-spoken, defender of the right to bear arms.

Yet he's a willing recruit in a fledgling effort to see whether the gun community itself -- sellers and owners of firearms, operators of shooting ranges -- can help Colorado and other Western states reduce their highest-in-the-nation suicide rates.

"Suicide is a tragedy, no matter how it's done," said Carey, whose adult daughter killed herself with a mix of alcohol and antidepressants a few years ago on the East Coast. He sees the logic in trying gun-specific prevention strategies in towns such as Montrose, however, where guns are an integral part of daily life.

"It's very expedient for people to commit suicide by a firearm, without too much forethought," Carey said. "Unfortunately, it's generally effective."

At the urging of a local police commander, Carey agreed last year to participate in the Gun Shop Project, a state-funded program in which gun sellers and range operators in five western Colorado counties were invited to help raise awareness about suicide.

It's a tentative but promising bid to open up a conversation on a topic that's been virtually taboo in these Western states: the intersection of guns and suicide.

Carey's shop counter now displays wallet-sized cards with information about a suicide hotline. A poster by the door offers advice about ways to keep guns away from friends or relatives at risk of killing themselves.

Carey says some customers take materials home, or ask a few questions.

Across the U.S., suicides account for nearly two-thirds of all gun deaths -- far outnumbering gun homicides.

In 2014, according to federal data, there were 33,599 firearm deaths; 21,334 of them were suicides.

That figure represents about half of all suicides that year; but in several western Colorado counties, and in some other Rocky Mountain states with high gun-ownership rates, more than 60 percent of suicides involve firearms.

Along with Alaska, the states with the highest rates form a contiguous bloc -- Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico.

All have age-adjusted suicide rates at least 50 percent higher than the national rate of 12.93 suicides per 100,000 people; Montana's rate, 23.80, is the highest in the nation.

Between 2000 and 2014, gun suicides increased by more than 51 percent in those states, while rising by less than 30 percent nationwide.

Theories abound as to why such high rates. Commonly cited factors include the isolation and economic hard times in rural areas of these states.

There also is belief a self-reliant frontier mindset deters some Westerners from seeking help when depression sinks in.

"We embrace the cowboy mentality," says Jarrod Hindman, director of Colorado's Office of Suicide Prevention. "If you're suffering, suck it up, pick yourself up by your boot straps. But that doesn't work very well if you're suicidal."

Underlying all these explanations is the fact firearms are more ubiquitous in the West than in most other parts of the country.

Catherine Barber, a suicide prevention expert at the Harvard School of Public Health, said residents of gun-owning homes are at higher risk of suicide than other people -- simply because a suicide attempt is more likely to involve a gun.

According to federal estimates, suicide attempts involving firearms succeed 85 percent of the time, compared to less than 10 percent of attempts involving drug overdoses and several other methods.

"It's not that gun owners are more suicidal," Barber argued. "It's that they're more likely to die in the event that they become suicidal, because they are using a gun."

Colorado's Gun Shop Project is modeled after a program pioneered in New Hampshire.

Barber helped design the initiative and hopes collaboration on firearm suicide prevention can spread nationwide.

"In the past, people shut up about this issue because they thought raising it meant raising the issue of gun control," she said. "It makes so much more sense to look at gun owners as part of the solution."

Hindman said that when he joined the state health department in 2004, talking about the role of firearms in suicide was discouraged.

It's still a sensitive topic, he said, but some funding has materialized for gun-specific initiatives.

In Montrose, Police Commander Keith Caddy has been around guns since childhood.

Now he's doing outreach for the Gun Shop Project -- and most of the businesses he has visited agreed to display suicide-awareness materials once they were assured it wasn't a gun-takeaway program in disguise.

"It's my duty to protect the community I serve," Caddy said. "If I can go out there and spend a little time talking to the gun shops, maybe the reward will be saving someone's life."