None of you will know what was in the news on Friday, November 5, 1982.

There was the “record one-day surge in the Dow Jones average” (a 43 point gain two days earlier was still making the papers, since the Dow had surpassed 1000). The unemployment rate had risen to 10.4% and nearly 12 million folks were out of work. There was news that an ailing Social Security trust fund needed to borrow $1 billion (real money back then) to pay beneficiaries. And a poll indicated “only 35 percent of the electorate” wanted to see Ronald Reagan reelected as President (he would win in a landslide two years later).

That was the national news, which doesn’t seem that much different from what is making news today. And if you take the time to read the following from the November 5, 1982, edition of  The Fort Scott (Kansas) Tribune, you will see that the local news hasn’t changed all that much either:

Fort Scott, Kansas, is where I was born and where I grew up. I was living there in 1982, when Kathy Moretti, then my sister-in-law, took her own life with a pistol.

Recently, a commenter sent me a link to an article that summarized “the scientific literature on the health risks and benefits of having a gun in the home for the gun owner and his/her family.” Among other things, the study found:

…there is no credible evidence of a deterrent effect of firearms or that a gun in the home reduces the likelihood or severity of injury during an altercation or break-in.

“No credible evidence of a deterrent effect of firearms,” the study found. That contradicts the NRA-propagated idea that people are safer with guns in their homes. In fact, the study found “that gun accidents are most likely to occur in homes with guns,” and that,

There is compelling evidence that a gun in the home is a risk factor for intimidation and for killing women in their homes.

That’s not really surprising is it? Men intimidating women with guns? Having more guns around doesn’t make women safer and no one in their right mind would so argue, even though we see people who are supposed to be in their right minds arguing it all the time.

But none of that is what I want to focus on from the study. It’s this:

The evidence is overwhelming for the fact that a gun in the home is a risk factor for completed suicide…

Completed suicide. Because of Kathy Moretti I know what that means.  She was a sweet and fragile soul, all 100 pounds of her. She wouldn’t have harmed a tick. She did not own a gun, nor was there one in her mother’s home, where she lived. In fact, I doubt if she had ever seen with her eyes a real gun before 1982, let alone held one in her hands.

But this depressed young woman got her hands on a gun at the home of her  brother. It wasn’t his gun. He had borrowed it to use as part of a Halloween costume—a cowboy—and had not yet returned it when his sister came to visit. There was no reason for him to think the ammo-less gun posed any danger to anyone, especially Kathy.

She had to go purchase bullets for the gun to make it work, to make it kill. And that she was able to do because people who sell bullets to hurting, depressed women aren’t in the business of asking questions. They are in the business of making money selling guns and ammo. The relatively tiny profit made off a box of .22 bullets sold to her sometime before November 5, 1982, is essentially why the NRA exists these days, it’s why that organization spends so much money buying politicians.

There isn’t a robust effort in this country to repeal the Second Amendment, which the Supreme Court has now applied to all jurisdictions. There isn’t even a robust effort to significantly curb gun possession. Thus, the main reason the NRA lives on is to promote the interests of gun and ammo manufacturers. Journalists who put Wayne LaPierre and other NRA spokesman on television or quote them in print should stop pretending otherwise and stop allowing the gun industry to disproportionately shape public opinion.

Kathy Moretti brought the gun and the bullets “north of a box car in a field about a quarter of a mile south of low-water bridge at Pavey’s Ford, between old and new Highway 54 on a gravel road.” There, in what I will always believe was only temporary misery that would some day pass, she died, with the gun and the bullets at her side, the gun and the bullets that the NRA insists are innocent pieces of this tragedy.

“Guns don’t kill people,” we are told. “People kill people.”

Oh, yeah? Again, science tells us that,

The evidence is overwhelming for the fact that a gun in the home is a risk factor for completed suicide…

The gun—the gun—is a risk factor. And the bullets that go in the gun. There’s no doubt in my mind that Kathy Moretti would be alive today had there not been a gun in her unsuspecting and subsequently heartbroken brother’s home in November of 1982. And by now, she may have had kids, even grandkids, if it were just slightly more difficult for someone to get bullets for guns they don’t own. Who knows?

But what we do know is that handguns, despite what the shills for gun manufacturers tell us, don’t really make most of us safer. Oh, they give us the illusion of safety, that’s for sure. They allow us to fantasize that should someone enter our home with evil intent, we are ready to protect ourselves, ready for a fight. That fantasy is comforting, which is why so many people are willing to keep a handgun at the ready.

The truth, though, is that we can actually measure the relative safeness of guns in the home, particularly for those going through tough emotional times. From the study I have been referencing:

From 2003 to 2007, an average of 46 Americans committed suicide with guns each day. This includes 2 teenagers (aged 15–19) and 3.5 young adults (aged 20–24) per day. Even though suicide attempts with guns are infrequent, more Americans kill themselves with guns than with all other methods combined. That is because among methods commonly used in suicide attempts, firearms are the most lethal.

“Firearms are the most lethal.” Most lethal. Most lethal. The coroner said Kathy Moretti “died in less than five minutes.” That is most lethal.

And for what? Why did she choose to die? Why did she make such a lamentable and irrevocable decision at 22 years old? I don’t know. Nobody knows. As I said, she suffered from what I believed then and believe more strongly now was only “temporary misery,” something bound to pass. From the study:

Many suicides appear to be impulsive acts. Individuals who take their own lives often do so when confronting a severe but temporary crisis. In a study of self-inflicted gunshot wounds, which would have been fatal without emergency treatment, none of the 30 attempters had written a suicide note, and more than half reported having suicidal thoughts for less than 24 hours. In 2 years of follow-up, none of the 30 attempted suicide again. Other studies that have followed survivors of serious suicide attempts find that fewer than 10% typically go on to kill themselves.

Suicidal individuals are often ambivalent about killing themselves. One expert estimates that no more than 10% to 15% of these individuals display an unbreakable determination to kill themselves. For the rest, the risk period is transient. Reducing the availability of commonly used and lethal instruments during this period can prevent suicide. Psychiatric and penal institutions have long recognized the importance of restricting access to lethal means of suicide for newly admitted and potentially suicidal inmates.

I don’t expect that any Second Amendment zealot, who might take the time to read the story of Kathy Moretti, will have an epiphany. I don’t expect them to suddenly recognize as legitimate the other side of the gun argument, a side that always swims against the tide of opinion ginned up by gun-industry money, that argues for gun sanity in an America awash in guns, an America ever more dangerous. especially for people “confronting a severe but temporary” personal crisis.

No, I don’t expect that. I just wish that we, civilized Americans living in the twenty-first century, would at least realize that as we militarize our schools and our homes, as we pretend that our children are more secure with an armed sentry in the classroom and that we are safer with a pistol under the pillow, that in too many cases we are endangering the most vulnerable among us.

May Kathy Moretti continue to rest in peace.