Zoklet.net - The Book Nook

Currently listening to the Audiobook of the Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed. Lots of nice detail in it, lots of 80 year old history that could be from the present day. The 1930s seem quite like the 2010s, I'm also reading When the Going Was Good, and I'm shocked to read Evelyn Waugh describe buses and vacuum cleaners alongside imperial rubber plantations and British political officers. It could be today.

Anyway, getting aside from the whole gun argument (which is pointless, Americans like shooting guns, and need them to protect themselves from wild niggers) its actually pretty common for people to just whip out a gun and just shoot themselves. If Hunter S. Thompson had had no gun he would probably still be alive today. If I had a gun I probably would have shot myself already (or gone postal on a crooked Irish politician), it is only the unpleasantness of suicide that ever stopped me doing it.

Guns bought as self defense used for suicide:

Quote:

In May 1905, while he was away at work, his wife, Margaret, apparently in the grip of postpartum depression after the birth of their fourth child, and recently released from a sanatorium in Atlantic City, chanced upon a revolver that the Strongs had just bought after a burglary scare in the neighborhood and shot herself.

Guns also encourage casual violence:

Quote:

In March 1914, the second Madanemoiselle. Caillaux, outraged that her husband's affairs,even those prior to her arrival in his life, should be so scandalously publicized and perhaps fearing that some of their own adulterous correspondence might also find its way into the press took matters into her own hands. At 3:00 p.m. on March 16, she left her home, dressed in the most elegant clothes for a reception at the Italian embassy that evening. On the way she stopped off at Gastinne Renette, the elite gun shop on the Right Bank, bought a Browning automatic, proceeded to the offices of Le Figaro, waited an hour for Gaston Calmette, the editor, and confronting him, declared, "You now why I have come", and calmly pumped six shots into him at point - blank range from the pistol that was hidden in her expensive fur muffs, killing him instantly.

Guns and easy access to poison encourage quick, casual suicides:

Quote:

...one of the largest banks in Hanover, had to close its doors and was accompanied by the usual litany of suicides by overextended financiers. One of the best-known bankers in Thuringia shot himself on Wednesday, July 29, and the next day a private banker in Potsdam killed his wife, then took cyanide himself.

Quote:

He had managed to cover up the loss for years with the connivance of several members of the Brussels office, by issuing IOUs on behalf of Lazards to its counterparts. The extent of the problem had only recently come to light when these obligations were finally presented. When confronted with the evidence, the trader in question, a Czech, confessed, then suddenly pulled out a gun in the office and shot himself. Fearing that the failure of a merchant bank of Lazards standing would set off a panic in the City, the Bank of England agreed to bail it out.

Quote:

On March 12, 1932, the world learned that Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish match king, who had bailed out so many penniless European countries, had shot himself in his apartment on the Avenue Victor Emmanuel III in Paris. At first it was assumed that he was just another victim of the times he had recently suffered a nervous breakdown and his physician had warned him about the constant strain of his lifestyle on his heart. Within three weeks it became apparent that his whole enterprise had been a sham. His accounts were riddled with inflated valuations and bogus assets, including $142 million of forged Italian government bonds. When the losses to investors were eventually tallied, they amounted to $400 million.Bankers were now increasingly viewed as crooks and rogues. In early 1932...

Are guns and cyanide bad? Should access to them be limited? I dunno, it certainly helps the drama of a story to have them involved. ]]>