Brad Parscale, Trump's former campaign manager, has been hospitalized after barricading himself in his home in Fort Lauderdale with multiple firearms and threatening to kill or otherwise harm himself on Sunday afternoon. His wife, who was not in the house with him, reported the incident to police who were able to talk him down and take him to Broward Health Medical Center for an evaluation.

Via New York Times:

The episode took place just before 4 p.m., the authorities said, outside a home that records show Mr. Parscale bought in 2019.

"When officers arrived on scene, they made contact with the reportee (wife of armed subject) who advised her husband was armed, had access to multiple firearms inside the residence and was threatening to harm himself," the Fort Lauderdale Police Department said in a statement. "Officers determined the only occupant inside the home was the adult male. Officers made contact with the male, developed a rapport, and safely negotiated for him to exit the home."

The reasons for Parscale's suicide attempt are not clear, although things have not really been going great for him lately.

Parscale was demoted in July after the disastrous Tulsa rally that Trump is still mad about — not because it murdered Herman Cain, but because not that many people showed up. Parscale had bragged about having a million ticket requests, and the Trump campaign made a whole big thing about it, setting up a satellite rally for all the overflow he expected. Except only 6,000 people showed up. Turned out, all of those RSVPs were from anti-Trump TikTok users who were just RSVPing to fuck with Trump. They'd record a TikTok, tell people to go RSVP for the rally and record their own video, and then quickly delete all the videos so there was no trace and no one knew what they were doing until it was too late.

Trump had supposedly already kinda soured on Parscale before this, blaming the campaign manager for not using campaign funds wisely, assuming that this was the reason for his poor performance in polls, not the fact that he was totally screwing up the COVID-19 response. Trump also reportedly did not like that the media had started to focus in on Parscale's glitzy lifestyle.

Tim Murtaugh has, however, decided that Democrats and ... we guess Project Lincoln? ... are at fault for Parscale's suicide attempt, rather than his being ditched by Trump, or fearing legal fallout from people looking into Trump's taxes, or any number of other possibilities that are not "Democrats did it." Or, you know, having a bad and stressful day, made worse by having access to a lot of weapons.

Brad Parscale is a member of our family and we all love him. We are ready to support him and his family in any way possible. The disgusting, personal attacks from Democrats and disgruntled RINOs have gone too far and they should be ashamed of themselves for what they've done to this man and his family.

Real classy there.

Shockingly enough, Florida actually does have a Red Flag Law on the books, meaning that officials could ask a judge to ban Parscale from having any weapons for up to a year. People who love guns love to say "guns don't kill people, people kill people" — but although guns are used in only 10 percent of all suicide attempts, they account for over 50 percent of all successful suicides.

People also love to say that people who want to kill themselves will "find a way," but that's not really true either. Otherwise, "means reduction" would not work as well as it does. Suicidal feelings, in fact, are frequently transient and there are several scientific studies backing this up.

As I wrote in Quartz in 2018:

In 1963, Britain experienced 5,714 suicides. Over the next several years, that number declined steadily and quickly; by 1975, the country had 3,693 suicides. This decline took place against a rise in suicides throughout the rest of Europe.

Social scientists started looking for something to explain the drop. What they realized was that the decrease in suicide had coincided with the progressive transition in British households from carbon monoxide-producing coal gas to natural gas, beginning in 1958.

Prior to the switch, 40% of all suicides in Britain were suicides by household gas, a death that was relatively easy, painless, and required little planning. People would just turn the oven on and drift away. When that option was no longer available, fewer people chose to commit suicide overall.

This phenomenon was documented by criminologists Ronald V. Clarke and Patricia Mayhew in a 1988 study titled "The British Gas Suicide Story and Its Criminological Implications." Clarke and Mayhew found that, when denied the most convenient means of being able to kill themselves, many people just didn't bother. "Few of those prevented from using gas appear to have found some other way of killing themselves," they write in their abstract. "These findings suggest that suicide is an intentional act designed to bring an end to deep, though sometimes transient, despair, chosen when moral restraints against the behavior are weakened, and when the person has ready access to a means of death that is neither too difficult nor repugnant."

There are a whole lot of good reasons not to have guns in your home. One of them is that maybe not having that option on the table will give us just a little bit more time to change our minds.

If you or someone you love is considering suicide, talk to someone and get help if you can. The number for the National Suicide Hotline is 1-800-273-8255.

PSA: There will be no, and we mean no, ideations or "jokes" in the comments about hoping Parscale or others come to harm. How many? None.

[New York Times]

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