MANY THINGS CAN BE TOOLS OF SUICIDE

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, February 7, 1992                   TAG: 9202070389
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short
MANY THINGS CAN BE TOOLS OF SUICIDE
WHY DIDN'T you use a picture of some kid lying in a pool of his own blood, his body riddled by bullet holes? If you're going to use high-impact visuals like your bullet-shot sign, why not get explicitly vivid?
In the "Kids and Guns" series, you used an American Medical Association Journal study stating that when a gun is in the house, odds increase 7,500 percent for a potentially suicidal adolescent to kill himself. Wow! Gee! I don't believe I need the medical profession to inform me it really isn't a good idea to give a suicidal person, adult or adolescent, free access to a gun.
You started out telling the tragic story of a 15-year-old who came home drunk and shot himself. Parents are responsible too. There are so many David Morrises in America today: Broken homes, drugs, alcohol, guns, automobiles, knives, tall buildings; all of these can be instruments of suicide. The bottom line is, we need to love them enough to keep them from becoming suicidal.
The gun was simply one of many thousands of instruments of death the boy could have chosen. Is the gun or the 15-year-old at fault? I do not think so! GARNETT E. SIMMERS RADFORD

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB