Absolutely. Sorry for the long post because I struggle to pare it all down but:

The suicide rate AND the homicide rate is because we live in an inhuman society that, underneath all the transparent PR, is practically egging you on to "just do it already."

• It tells us that "unless you have money and power, which strip you of your humanity, you don't matter, and in fact, nothing else does either." We're then shocked when people act like psychopaths.

• Everything once held sacred is now deconstructed with the most cynical of irony, after it's been perverted and exploited for profit, of course. Traditions, communal rituals, the very concept of family, things that once held peoples together are now ridiculed and discarded.

• People see everything through the lens of a transaction, even romantic relationships, even marriages. We're encouraged to be slaves to our egos and "pursue" fleeting happiness at all costs.

• People are encouraged to see each other by their different labels, and tribe up against other labels, because that sells more plastic garbage.

• Social media empires pervade our waking lives and manipulate us into releasing a ridiculous amount of cortisol that would shock our ancestors.

• Our jobs are totalitarian dictatorships that we're forced to volunteer in so we can bother to exist within our borders of a country that is "so great and free."

• Everyone is very suspicious of everyone else. It's rude form to just go introduce yourself and talk to someone. It's harassment unless you're meeting other people through some commercialized app. If someone comes up and talks to you out of the blue, they probably have some kind of angle.

Ultimately.... Guns don't go off by themselves. We could have 10x as many guns in this country, hand em' out for free even, and, barring negligence and stupidity, suicides and homicides would still drop dramatically if people weren't constantly DARED to use them every second of their existence. On themselves, on "others."

Our media also glorifies weaponry as some kind of ultimate problem-solver. So much power to change something, ANYTHING, at the pull of a trigger. And so many people are so desperate to just affect something.

If they had access to education, care, mental wellness, actually felt like they mattered, and weren't obviously seen to just be batteries and cattle by the ones designing and "influencing" this culture. Those guns wouldn't go off nearly so often.

When we have teenagers and young adults contemplating their own deaths because a contented existence seems so out of touch and the struggle for better so hopeless, what happened??

But the conversation seems to be less "How do we make a world where people DON'T wish to kill themselves or others so often?" And more "How do we stop them from doing it?"

Which, at its most idealistic extreme, will simply produce a hell-world of limbless, miserable torso-brains with no way out of misery.

Every day we carry on and try to love our neighbors, and make anything just a bit better, and forgive our enemies, and be content with what things we own, is a radical act of defiance against the principalities and powers that feed on the cultivation of our very worst selves.