Hey, congrats, so do I!
See, if it were me, I’d say that a suicide attempt should absolutely be a reason not to be allowed to own a gun. That’s a reasonable regulation (IMO) that would keep people who have already illustrated a lack of due care for themselves from having access to an easy and often immediately-successful means of ending their life (and possibly the lives of others as well) in a fit of despair. To be honest, I’m not sure why nobody took your friend’s gun away from him, since “tried to OD on pills” is a pretty damn big warning sign that they might do something extremely drastic, given the opportunity.
There is no regulation that will prevent all suicides, by gun or any other means. But we do have a track record of doing things to mitigate people’s ability to kill themselves. Things like fencing in sidewalks on bridges and observation decks on tall buildings, or eliminating coal gas ovens, or odorants in chemicals like natural gas, or doing what we can to minimize CO output from car exhaust. Even if the impact on suicide is incidental to the intent of those changes, they’re still good changes. If there were even just actual enforced regulations on things like proper care and safe storage of firearms, it could help to eliminate some of the most rapid-impulse suicides that are enabled by pulling a loaded gun out of a bedside drawer. (It could also prevent things like friends impulsively shooting their roommates when they arrive home unexpectedly late at night and fail to announce themselves.)
Of course, simply making gun ownership contingent on need rather than desire might also help by cutting down on the number of handguns in people’s homes (if you want to shoot one, go rent one at a range), but I suspect needing to justify the purpose of firearm ownership is a bridge well too far beyond reasonable for you.
Perhaps I should have been more clear: the NRA can either contribute their expertise, or regulation will be crafted without it. Since the NRA’s stance seems to be that nobody outside the NRA has any understanding whatsoever about guns and is merely reacting and creating incompetent policy out of emotional and irrational fear of guns, they are actively marching themselves into a scenario where regulation will be crafted by the very people they most fear will craft it.
Does that mean we can digitize the NICS database and let the ATF join the 20th century so that we’re not relying on distributed and error-prone paper record searches to enforce background check requirements? That’d be another nice thing that the NRA is absolutely dead-set against allowing, since then Teh Gubmint Will Know Who Owns The Guns!
