The Other Shoe Drops

The right wing has been flooding the media with vitriol after the suicide of Robin Williams: Rush Limbaugh blamed his leftist world view, Fox News host Shepard Smith called Williams a liberal coward, and so on. Of course, they jumped on this immediately without waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Now that shoe has dropped: Williams' wife, Susan Schneider, revealed that Williams was in the early stages of Parkinson's disease. If you're not familiar with Parkinson's (my father-in-law, my aunt's father and our neighbor all had it), it is an incurable disease that involves the loss of motor control neurons in the brain, which causes constant tremors that affect manual dexterity, speech, and walking. Sometimes dementia results, as it did with our neighbor.

Other celebrities have had Parkinson's: Michael J. Fox is the most well-known, but Linda Ronstadt's singing career was ended by the disease. Yes, many people have gone on to lead fulfilling lives after getting a diagnosis of some terrible neurological disorder: Stephen Hawking had a career as one of the leading physicists of the age after contracting ALS, also called Lou Gehrig's disease.

But Robin Williams' forte was not physics, mathematics and cosmology; it was comedy, comedy that was based on the quick delivery of flights of fancy and spot-on imitation and mimicry. Something that a Parkinson's sufferer simply cannot manage.

And it's not like liberal comics have cornered the market on tragic suicide. Suicide is common in the conservative world. Take, for example, the son of Oral Roberts, Ronald, who committed suicide in 1982 by shooting himself in the heart six months after coming out as gay. Or Matthew Warren, the son of Rick Warren, reverend of the Saddleback Valley Community Church, who committed suicide some years after telling his father, "Dad, I know I’m going to heaven. Why can’t I just die and end this pain?" There were unconfirmed rumors Matthew was gay. Or Marie Osmond's son, Michael Blosil, committed suicide in 2010, and again there were rumors he was gay (he was a student at a fashion institute). Or Isaac Hunter, a reverend at a megachurch in Florida, who committed suicide after admitting an affair.

Or Jesse Ryan Loskarn, former chief of staff for Lamarr Alexander, who committed suicide this year after being arrested for watching child porn. In his suicide note he said he was drawn to videos that repeated the abuse he suffered at the hands of family members as a child.

Or Mark Mayfield, the attorney and Tea Party operative who committed suicide a month ago after being charged with conspiring to film Thad Cochran's bedridden wife in a nursing home: his Tea-Party hijinks led directly to his death by his own hand. After Mayfield's death the press was filled with paeans to his wonderfulness; did any conservatives call him cowardly for giving up the fight for what he believed in?

It's impossible to count the number of gay teenagers who have committed suicide. Many of them are depressed because they are different and felt alienated, constantly taunted by other kids who are egged on by the incessant drumbeat from conservatives who say that gays are going to hell and will burn in torment forever. Do gay teens commit suicide because they are depressed, or are they depressed because of the intolerance and hatred conservatives constantly spew?

It's clear that neither the right nor the left has a monopoly on suicide. Many people who survive their first suicide attempt never try again. Sure, if you really want to kill yourself, you'll eventually succeed. But there's a caveat: suicides by gunshot are easy, relatively clean (for the victim), and are more successful than other methods. The easy availability of guns among the right makes it more likely that they'll succeed the first time: liberals have to rely on less reliable methods such as sleeping pills and hanging.

If Tea Party darling Mark Mayfield hadn't had a gun at hand in his moment of despair, might he still be alive today?

Two-thirds of all firearms deaths are by suicide. More importantly, you are far more likely to commit suicide with your gun than you are to kill someone else in self-defense: in 2010 there were 230 justifiable homicides and 19,392 suicides committed with firearms. That means you -- or someone in your family -- are 84 times more likely to intentionally kill yourselves with your gun than an assailant.

Now, are you sure you want that gun in your nightstand where your depressed child knows you keep it?