In Natrona County, Wyoming, the Platte River runs alongside Casper Mountain, with its thick forests and astonishing vistas, and every year the local coroner assembles data into a package called the “Suicide Report.” Its mere existence implies that an area of natural beauty and splendor is contending with an unnatural, unrelenting epidemic.
On October 1, the coroner, James Whipps, a large, bald man with glasses and a goatee, sat before the Natrona County Board of County Commissioners in a bright courtroom. He did not have good news. “In the last two months, since I talked to you last, we’ve had nine suicides, and that brings us in the county to a total of 24 for the year,” he said. His voice was sober and frank, like a small-town sheriff describing an unsolved violent crime. “We still have three months of the year to go, and if the last two months are any indication, we’ll set a record that was worse than the one we set in 2021.”
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According to Whipps’s data, 18 of the 24 suicides were carried out with a firearm, a slice of a statewide trend. Last year, 75 percent of suicides in Wyoming involved guns, and the state had the highest gun suicide rate in the country. Yet in March, Wyoming, under single-party Republican control, enacted a law to expressly ban red flag statutes, which have been adopted in 21 states. Red flag laws allow family members and law enforcement officials to go before a judge and make the case that a person should be temporarily disarmed because they pose an imminent risk to themself or others.
Dallas Laird, a wistful, soft-spoken 78-year-old commissioner, addressed the room. “Last week, one of my best friends’ boy shot himself and killed himself,” he said. “A boy that I’ve known his whole life. And his mother’s in Europe and his sister called me and she was in tears — I could hardly understand her.” The boy, named Ryan, called him Uncle Dallas. He went on, “I never know what to say.”
“I haven’t called his mother back yet,” he added. “Because I text her, I says, ‘I will when I know what to say. I just don’t know what to say.’”
Not that long ago, red flag laws were widely touted as a bipartisan solution to gun violence. Both Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association had endorsed them. But then the laws became a centerpiece of reform for the Biden administration, and a backlash from Second Amendment groups and the far-right ensued. Since 2020, four Republican-controlled states, including Wyoming, have implemented a prohibition on such laws. The other three — Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Tennessee — are also consistently among the states with the highest gun suicide rates in the country, according to data provided by Cassandra Crifasi, an epidemiologist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University.
For red flag opponents, banning or fighting the statutes has been embraced as a righteous cause. There are false claims of rampant misuse and supposed violations of due process and the Second Amendment. Nathan Dahm, the state senator who sponsored Oklahoma’s anti red flag bill, told me he is protecting his constituents from government infringement. The year before Dahm introduced his bill, records show, a colleague of his, who was 53, sat on a recliner in his study, and, using one of his 15 handguns, shot himself in the chest. Last year, Oklahoma had the sixth-highest gun suicide rate in the country. “Everyone dies,” Dahm said, as I pressed him about the relationship between firearms and suicide. “That’s life.” When it comes to the freedoms he believes he’s protecting, he added, “I’m not going to say it’s a valid tradeoff or acceptable or anything along those lines. But everyone will die.”
The fight over red flag laws is undergirded by political tribalism. Before West Virginia instituted its red flag prohibition, documents acquired through a public records request show that state delegates received auto-generated emails with the subject line “OPPOSE RED FLAG GUNS LAWS.”
“Gun control groups have tricked and shamed legislators to pass these laws,” the emails said, claiming that they have a “mission of imposing” the statute on West Virginia next. One delegate responded: “I, too, share your concerns with red flag gun laws. I will oppose any such attempts and preserve our Second Amendment rights.”
“If some kid is threatening to kill himself, why shouldn’t we take his guns from him?” Natrona County Commissioner Dallas Laird asked a Wyoming state lawmaker.
This year, Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic nominee for president, announced the formation of a red flag resource center, which would be housed within the Department of Justice and help states, municipalities, and law enforcement make the most of the statutes. In response, the state Attorney General’s Office in West Virginia spearheaded an effort to undermine the initiative. It wrote a letter of protest to Merrick Garland, the head of the Department of Justice, and circulated it to other Republican attorneys general in various states. Emails obtained through additional public records requests show that a staffer from the West Virginia AG’s Office implored them to join the protest, writing, “National gun-rights organizations have sharply criticized the center since it was announced.”
The solicitor general from the Iowa Attorney General’s Office said the state was “pleased” to sign on, but requested an edit. He objected to a sentence in the letter that read, “Little reliable evidence suggests that red-flag laws have any real effect on gun violence.”
“Is it possible to replace the phrase ‘gun violence’ with ‘gun crime’?” the solicitor general asked. “Guns do not commit crime, people do.” The term “gun violence,” he explained, is “hostile.” In the end, the reference was simply removed and the letter was signed by 19 states.
Tens of thousands of lives are lost every year to gun suicide, which is the cause of most gun deaths in America. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that taking one’s life is often an impulsive act, and that the period of ideation that precedes it is time-limited. Gaining access to a firearm during that window almost always leads to a fatal outcome.
A 2022 study, published in Injury Prevention, examined the effectiveness of California’s red flag law during the first three years of its implementation, from 2016 through 2018. About 41 percent of the cases it reviewed involved self-harm, and in no instance did a person die by gun suicide after their guns were temporarily removed. Another red flag study, published this year in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, examined nearly 3,000 cases across four states that contained a documented suicide concern. It estimated that for every 13 orders that were issued, one death was prevented.
When Ryan was little, he had taken his first steps to Laird, the Natrona County commissioner. As Ryan grew older, he played hockey and rode bulls and four-wheelers. He seemed to vibrate with energy, but also carried an ever-expanding sadness, which grew until there was little space for anything else.
Laird imagined Ryan’s mind as a haunted house; new residents were always moving in. Ryan tried to subdue them with alcohol and drugs. His obituary said that life “was unbearably painful to him at times. He felt overwhelmed.” When Ryan got arrested, Laird, a lawyer, helped him with his legal problems, just as he’d helped Ryan’s father in 1978, when the father accidentally shot and killed a woman with his pistol. Ryan used the same pistol on himself.
Sitting among the commissioners, Laird felt despair. He stared out in front of him, resting his face against his fist. He had worried about Ryan, and wondered if he might one day harm himself. “If you were talking to a young man…” Laird said, before trailing off. He began to cry, his fitful breathing amplified by his microphone. He was still in his seat, but it seemed as if he were lurching forward. “And he was thinking about killing himself? What would you say to him?”
At this stage of his life, Laird finds that he cries often. He wonders whether it’s his age, or if there’s simply a lot to cry about, or maybe it’s some mixture of the two. Ryan was loved, and yet he didn’t seem to believe it. How could that be? What is happening in his community? He thinks that most families don’t know what to do when someone is in crisis, or they can’t afford therapy. Guns are everywhere, woven into the fabric of rural American culture. Hunting elk and moose is a tradition that connects one generation to the next. Children are taught to shoot. Notions about self-protection, and what it means to stand sentry before your family, have become like a religious creed, even when the real danger tends to lurk within.
Laird believes too many people feel like they’re going nowhere, and that feeling worms its way into the soul, infects it, until the day comes when they grab a firearm. In Wyoming, more than 85 percent of gun deaths are suicide.
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As the meeting in Natrona County progressed, Laird said: “So let me see if I can fine-tune this a little better. If you were me, and you’d known this boy for his whole life…” He was crying again, his words trapped in his throat. He forced them out, his voice straining. “What would you say to his mother? What would you actually say to her? Because I don’t know what to say to her!” Laird then stood up and walked out of the room.
Three weeks later, he had breakfast at a small diner in Casper called Sherrie’s Place, a longtime favorite among locals. The sun was out, and the weather was still reasonably warm. Laird spotted a state lawmaker and his wife sitting in a booth. Suicide, and what could be done about it, was still on his mind.
“If some kid is threatening to kill himself,” he asked, “why shouldn’t we take his guns from him?”
“You know, Dallas,” he said, “I don’t think we can pass a law like that.”
“Well, what should we do?”
The lawmaker did not have an answer. In the weeks that had passed since the commissioners had met in the courtroom, there had been three more suicides in Natrona County, two of them involving a firearm. The total suicide count was now 27. There were over two months left in the year, plenty of time to set a new record.
The post In the Land of Firearm Suicide, Republicans Ban a Policy That Might Help appeared first on The Trace.