People who attempt suicide are not write offs.

[Seth]

The bridge I mentioned was altered due to the simple fact that so many people had used it for suicide. Obviously, tall buildings and the like that are not so used will not be enmeshed. But other suicide magnets are altered to prevent suicides, as I suspect is also the case in the USA. Removing the opportunity for suicide simply makes good sense.

No it doesn't. Put up a net at one place and a suicidal person will just find another place or way to kill themselves. And while it might make sense to put up a net on one bridge to protect the people below, this cannot be expanded into a general argument for trying to remove every mechanism, method or location a suicidal person might choose. It's a ridiculous and irrational argument that you consistently try to use to justify gun bans that has nothing to do with suicide and everything to do with your anti-gun bias.

[Seth]

We have seen people on this forum treat would-be suicides as losers who should be written off. "Let them kill themselves - no loss!"

I don't recall anybody here saying anything like that

I have. But not because they are "losers" but because it's their sovereign right to do so. And I've said "no loss" as a rebuttal to the ridiculous fallacy that because someone famous contemplated suicide and didn't go through with it that this justifies any and every sort of anti-suicide effort possible, regardless of the consequences to everyone else's liberty.

You might interpret it as "no net loss" because while any individual's death is obviously a loss, everybody dies eventually and that fact does not justify imposing any and every cost in vain attempts to prolong life on everyone else. Sorry, but no suicidal individual's life is more valuable than my individual liberties and I will not be stripped of my individual liberties on the specious argument that it is necessary to do so because some suicidal person might kill themselves if I'm not stripped of my rights.

[Seth]

I don't give a toss about peoples' right to harm themselves.
In fact, I don't give a toss about peoples rights at all. So long as we have laws, we restrict rights.
So long as the laws are arrived at in a democratic way, and people are free to fuck-off somewhere else, if they don't like it, I'm ok with it. In fact, I support it.
Laws are what make the world a great place to live. When you get a bad law that you can't live with, you can campaign against it, or fuck off.

...said the Nazi to the Jew....

[mistermack]

...said the Nazi to the Jew....

You missed out the important bit, troll.

[Blind groper]

No it doesn't. Put up a net at one place and a suicidal person will just find another place or way to kill themselves.

And there we see the essential fallacy in Seth's argument.

Researchers have found that most suicide attempts are done on impulse, and that impulse is short lived. If no easy means of suicide is found within the short period of that impulse, then that person will not attempt suicide. Remove the easy means, and the person will survive.

I was recently reading a story of a man with depression who went to the edge of a cliff to jump off. It took time to get there, and by the time he arrived, the impulse had mostly passed. He stood looking at the cliff for some minutes before walking away. He was so shocked at his close escape from death that he vomited several times. Postpone the access to a suicide tool, and the person will get past the suicide impulse and survive.

[JimC]

No it doesn't. Put up a net at one place and a suicidal person will just find another place or way to kill themselves.

And there we see the essential fallacy in Seth's argument.

Researchers have found that most suicide attempts are done on impulse, and that impulse is short lived. If no easy means of suicide is found within the short period of that impulse, then that person will not attempt suicide. Remove the easy means, and the person will survive.

I was recently reading a story of a man with depression who went to the edge of a cliff to jump off. It took time to get there, and by the time he arrived, the impulse had mostly passed. He stood looking at the cliff for some minutes before walking away. He was so shocked at his close escape from death that he vomited several times. Postpone the access to a suicide tool, and the person will get past the suicide impulse and survive.

Also, if certain prominent places like bridges become known as a suicide spot, they exert an unhealthy attraction to people in a depressed state of mind. The more suicides, the more the attraction, a kind of morbid snow-balling effect. The same thing happened in Melbourne with our West Gate bridge, until appropriate fencing was erected. Sure, some serious suicides will find another way, but it will at least reduce the number to an extent, and so is worth doing.

[Seth]

...said the Nazi to the Jew....

You missed out the important bit, troll.

No I didn't. The Jews tried to tell the Nazis to fuck off and got baked for their trouble.

Democracy is shit. It's tyranny of the majority, nothing more, and it always ends up killing people it doesn't like.

In our Constitutional Republic which uses some limited democratic processes, I'm the one who gets to tell you and everybody else to fuck off if what you want violates my fundamental, unalienable, natural, individual rights. And the law is on MY side in doing so.

[Seth]

No it doesn't. Put up a net at one place and a suicidal person will just find another place or way to kill themselves.

And there we see the essential fallacy in Seth's argument.

Researchers have found that most suicide attempts are done on impulse, and that impulse is short lived. If no easy means of suicide is found within the short period of that impulse, then that person will not attempt suicide. Remove the easy means, and the person will survive.

Again, "remove the easy means" is nothing more than your Newspeak for "ban guns." You have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the nets on that particular bridge prevented even one suicide. All you can say is that nobody committed suicide using THAT BRIDGE.

I was recently reading a story of a man with depression who went to the edge of a cliff to jump off. It took time to get there, and by the time he arrived, the impulse had mostly passed. He stood looking at the cliff for some minutes before walking away. He was so shocked at his close escape from death that he vomited several times. Postpone the access to a suicide tool, and the person will get past the suicide impulse and survive.

Again, your argument is fallacious and dishonest. You know full well that it's impossible to "postpone the access to a suicide tool" except by doing one of two things: institutionalizing everyone so no one ever has access to anything dangerous; or, wrap them in cotton batting and make nothing that can ever hurt anyone ever.

And you completely ignore (deliberately and mendaciously) the consequences of limiting everyone's access to "suicide tools" in hopes of "postponing access to a suicide tool" of a tiny number of persons who wish to commit suicide. You don't care about the rights of the many, and you don't even care about the lives of the few, you just want to construct ridiculous and unattainable schemes to justify banning a tool that you have a paranoid fear of.

Life is not safe. Sometimes you die. If you don't like living, then kill yourself or ask for help, that's your right. But keep your ridiculous rationalizations off my rights and liberties.

[Seth]

No it doesn't. Put up a net at one place and a suicidal person will just find another place or way to kill themselves.

And there we see the essential fallacy in Seth's argument.

Researchers have found that most suicide attempts are done on impulse, and that impulse is short lived. If no easy means of suicide is found within the short period of that impulse, then that person will not attempt suicide. Remove the easy means, and the person will survive.

I was recently reading a story of a man with depression who went to the edge of a cliff to jump off. It took time to get there, and by the time he arrived, the impulse had mostly passed. He stood looking at the cliff for some minutes before walking away. He was so shocked at his close escape from death that he vomited several times. Postpone the access to a suicide tool, and the person will get past the suicide impulse and survive.

Also, if certain prominent places like bridges become known as a suicide spot, they exert an unhealthy attraction to people in a depressed state of mind. The more suicides, the more the attraction, a kind of morbid snow-balling effect. The same thing happened in Melbourne with our West Gate bridge, until appropriate fencing was erected. Sure, some serious suicides will find another way, but it will at least reduce the number to an extent, and so is worth doing.

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing, right?

Yes, like the Golden Gate Bridge, which 150 people a year throw themselves off of, it makes sense to make it more difficult to do so because it's one identifiable location that, as you say, people are drawn to, sometimes from the opposite end of the country (yes, people have traveled all the way across the US just to jump from the Golden Gate). But it's taken more than 50 years for SF to decide to put in nets because of the cost and because of the negative visual impacts on the landmark. But like the anti-suicide grate on the Empire State Building, it's less about preventing suicide than it is about public safety and the costs incurred by society. It costs tens of thousands of dollars every time somebody jumps from the Golden Gate, by the time the Coast Guard fishes out the body and the investigation has been completed, and people jumping off the Empire State Building were landing on pedestrians on the sidewalks below.

But this does not mean that society should spend the money or suffer the associated consequences of trying to eliminate this, that or all "tools of suicide" in order to protect some tiny number of people at the expense of the other 300 million.

If that's the metric, then they will have to fill the Grand Canyon with cement or build a 20 foot fence all along the rim.

And fence off all beaches and ocean accesses or accesses to water anywhere, to prevent suicide by drowning.

And that's after they've leveled all the tall structures and confiscated all the rope.

Sheesh.

[JimC]

Seth, that is what we're saying anyway, both BG and I. The fact that it would be ridiculous to attempt to stop all possible suicide venues doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile suicide-proofing the really prominent examples, like the West Gate in Melbourne, and the Golden Gate in your country, as you said yourself. And I agree that at least part of the reason is to stop the collateral damage and expense incurred per suicide.

Neither of us have taken the suicide prevention idea to absurd lengths; as is often the case, you have vented your spleen on a straw man...

[Seth]

Seth, that is what we're saying anyway, both BG and I. The fact that it would be ridiculous to attempt to stop all possible suicide venues doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile suicide-proofing the really prominent examples, like the West Gate in Melbourne, and the Golden Gate in your country, as you said yourself. And I agree that at least part of the reason is to stop the collateral damage and expense incurred per suicide.

Neither of us have taken the suicide prevention idea to absurd lengths; as is often the case, you have vented your spleen on a straw man...

Well, you haven't, but BG has, constantly. The OP is valid enough, but I'm merely forestalling what I see as an inevitable resort to his classic "ban handguns" argument. Perhaps I'm wrong and he's going to avoid it this time, but I will be very surprised if he does. The way he phrases his generalities like "tools of suicide" is ample evidence to me that he's priming the pump for another anti-gun rant. Any rational person knows that it is simply impossible to keep "tools of suicide" away from suicidal people because there are so many ways to commit suicide using common ordinary household objects. That being the case, the only explanation I can see for his use of that phrase is to make an indirect swipe at his favorite boogy-man.

You and I agree that there are reasonable precautions society can take at "suicide magnets" to reduce the problem. But I hope you can see that the very ambiguous way BG addresses this is simply a smoke screen. If I say "why yes, we should eliminate or slow access to suicide tools" I think it's inevitable that he will immediately launch into a "well, why not ban handguns then" rebuttal, and I want to take that wind out of his sails right away.

If he were being honest he'd do as you are doing and argue specifics and advocate for anti-suicide netting on places where suicides occur with some regularity. We would have no disagreement with such a statement. But that's not what his carefully ambiguous "tools of suicide" really means and I know it full well.

So, if the actual OP is that suicidal people are not "write offs" and that limited effective measures to prevent people from using public structures to commit suicide on, then the discussion is largely over because I'm all for that.

But I suspect a more cloaked and dishonest motive at work here, so I'm going to operate on that assumption.

[Blind groper]

Seth

First : your statement that I cannot prove the mesh around the bridge stopped suicides. Sure. But it was a regular means for people to kill themselves, with at least one such death each year, and since it was caged in (several decades now), there has not been a single suicide off that bridge. I am inclined to suggest that this means the meshing was successful.

The reason that bridge was chosen for this modification is that it was a proven magnet for suicides. Other sites that have not attracted suicides are not so treated.

On starting an argument about guns.
Not interested. Been there, done that. I already know almost to the last letter what your arguments are. I also know that such an argument would never end. So I would rather not start one.

[Seth]

Seth

First : your statement that I cannot prove the mesh around the bridge stopped suicides. Sure. But it was a regular means for people to kill themselves, with at least one such death each year, and since it was caged in (several decades now), there has not been a single suicide off that bridge. I am inclined to suggest that this means the meshing was successful.

Yes, it was successful at achieving it's intended purpose, which was to prevent suicides at that location.

The reason that bridge was chosen for this modification is that it was a proven magnet for suicides. Other sites that have not attracted suicides are not so treated.

Yes, but again, so what? That in no way provides any evidence supporting an assertion that it was effective at cutting the number of suicides. The issue before us is a question of how far society is obliged to go towards protecting potential suicides against themselves. Your rather generalized statement of "remove the tools of suicide" is so vague as to be useless because it should be quite obvious that it's impossible to do so for a couple of reasons, the first being the sheer and varied number of methods by which people can kill themselves; and the other being the obvious unintended consequences of focusing on removing those tools to the detriment of individual freedom and liberty of the society at large. Putting a screen up on a particular bridge, or, as is done these days, designing pedestrian bridges over major highways with enclosing fencing, sometimes tubular, is perfectly reasonable and while it adds expense to the project, it's worth doing not only to prevent suicides but to prevent criminals from dropping objects onto moving vehicles, which kills a number of people every year.

The same is true of designing in anti-suicide barriers on tall buildings. But determined suicides have managed to defeat these precautions. People have climbed the barrier on the Empire State Building, and just recently a woman was able to slip through a horizontal gap in such a barrier and throw herself from the building because the slot was just large enough for a small person to do so. This was rectified by putting a bar in the gap to make it impossible to do that again. The gap was designed in so that people on the observation deck could take photos unobstructed by dirty glass. But, it's theoretically possible for someone to scale that barrier to commit suicide.

It comes down to what reasonable precautions society can and is willing to take and what goes beyond the pale of common sense and economic reason. It's easy to justify safety measures to protect the public against accidental death in places where the risk has been manufactured, such as railings on stairways, but it's not reasonable to take those precautions to ridiculous extents that negatively affect the bulk of society merely because a risk of suicide exists. That's why people fall off, and jump off the edge of the Grand Canyon with some regularity. They are either incredibly stupid or suicidal, but in either case erecting a barrier in front of the scenic views to prevent such things is not warranted.

As a side note, the last time I was at the Grand Canyon, perhaps 30 years ago, I was standing at one of the famous overlooks. It has a wall about three feet high and three feet thick on the edge of a 2000 foot clear vertical drop. There are no warning signs or fences. As I stood there, a father lifted his perhaps six year old daughter to the top of the wall and told her to stand there as he retreated about 40 feet to take a picture of her. I swooped in, grabbed the girl and took her off the wall and berated the father for endangering his child in that way, to which the park ranger sprinting towards us from some distance away responded with relief, gratitude and a ticket for the father.

You can't prevent people from being stupid or suicidal and you can't prevent all of them from suffering the consequences of their actions, nor should we.

On starting an argument about guns.
Not interested. Been there, done that. I already know almost to the last letter what your arguments are. I also know that such an argument would never end. So I would rather not start one.

Fine by me, but I'm watching you.

[mistermack]

I swooped in, grabbed the girl and took her off the wall and berated the father for endangering his child in that way, to which the park ranger sprinting towards us from some distance away responded with relief, gratitude and a ticket for the father.

You can't prevent people from being stupid or suicidal and you can't prevent all of them from suffering the consequences of their actions, nor should we.

You really excelled yourself there. How do you think them up ?

[Seth]

I swooped in, grabbed the girl and took her off the wall and berated the father for endangering his child in that way, to which the park ranger sprinting towards us from some distance away responded with relief, gratitude and a ticket for the father.

You can't prevent people from being stupid or suicidal and you can't prevent all of them from suffering the consequences of their actions, nor should we.

You really excelled yourself there. How do you think them up ?

The point is that I did not advocate a 20 foot chain link fence along the precipice as a necessary solution to the stupidity of the father. Instead, as an individual, I chose to act in defense of that particular little girl, as the law allows and indeed commands. Thus the solution to the "problem" of unsafe precipices is not to do something that interferes with everyone's use or enjoyment, it's to deal with individual situations as they occur, if and when it is possible to do so, and simply ignore the irrelevant fact that someone COULD potentially choose to use that place as a method of suicide.

It's interesting to note that there are almost no affirmative duties imposed on citizens when it comes to criminal acts. In almost every case the law proscribes particular conduct rather than requiring it (at least here in the US), which is why you, or I, or even the police can simply stand there and do nothing while some person kills himself or others. But when it comes to children, it is fairly universal in the US that adults have an affirmative obligation to act to protect a child if they see the child in danger and you can be prosecuted for not doing so. Although seldom enforced, the law burdens ALL adults with this duty, so if you are driving along and see a toddler wandering into the street, you have a legal duty to stop and keep that child safe. Technically, if you just drive by, you have committed a crime. Thus, if I had failed to act and the girl had fallen, I could have been held criminally liable.