Saturday, June 2, 2012

SUICIDE

I don't have any prohibition against suicide and feel that physician assisted suicide should be available to the elderly and terminally ill that want it.

There is a danger that the family and perhaps some others might try to hasten a person's decision for suicide so they could get at the inheritance. I think this should be made a crime.

Suicide among the young, however, is a tragedy in that some tend to see the future as being so black and don't understand the ups and downs of life and that there probably are opportunities for better things awaiting. Even someone like John Hinckley, who almost killed a president of the United States and turned his press secretary - Brady - into a vegetable, is spending about a third of his time out of confinement and even has a drivers license (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hinckley,_Jr.). I disagree with this, but it does show that even what should be the blackest of futures may not be.

What I am devastated over, however, is those committing suicide first taking the lives of many others before killing themselves. We all recall the massacres at Columbine High School, CO, in 1999* and Virginia Tech, VA, in 2007.** A recent case is that of Jason Todd in Gilbert, AZ on May 3, 2012: http://phoenixcriminallawnews.com/2012/05/police-gilbert-shooting-that-left-5-dead-was-murder-suicide.html. A greater alertness to the potentials of certain mentally unstable people might help prevent such things, but making guns more difficult for such people would help. Unfortunately, gun control of any sort in the U.S. is vigorously opposed.*** As for individuals, wouldn't physician assisted suicides be preferable to the more than 15,000 gun related suicides per year in the U.S.?

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_massacre
*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States

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