Suicide Mart

I was listening to Footy, a South Florida talk show host, while driving to work this morning, and he tossed out an interesting premise that I thought I'd air out here.

Over the past year or so there have been some really crazy murder/suicides in the U.S.

There was the Virginia Tech student. There was the guy at Northern Illinois University last month. There was a guy last week, I believe, in the Bristol Tennessee area who shot four people at an apartment complex before fleeing and later fatally shooting himself.

And on Tuesday afternoon there was the guy here in South Florida, who walked into a Wendy's restaurant, blasted a bunch of diners and then shot and killed himself.

So I won't get into a deep argument about whether or not the killers needed help. Clearly they needed something.

Also, I don't mean to sound calloused, but whenever something like this happens the experts are always so quick to look for a reason that involves a treatable condition...gone untreated.

But I wonder sometimes if it isn't that complicated. Maybe these people who kill others before taking their own lives are just old-fashioned, unfixable, bat poop crazy. Maybe they're just bad. Those aren't medical theories, and I'll probably catch flack from mental health care workers. But I'm a simple guy. I sometimes think in straight lines. I'm just wondering.

It seems to me that of all the violent things to do, suicide is pretty selfish - especially for those people who are leaving behind dependents and loved ones. And to murder other folks before you commit suicide? That's hella selfish.

But I'm rambling.

Back to Footy's theory. Just for the record, I'm not advocating suicide. But he proposed the creation of Suicide Depots, where if you want to end it, you can go and take yourself out in a variety of ways for a nominal fee. If you're the jumping type, you could leap off a roof at the depot. If you're a shooter, you could do it that way. If you don't own a gun, they could rent/loan you one for the deed. I'm assuming they'd insist on payment up front.

This way, Footy reasoned, people who wanted to kill themselves could handle it in a controlled environment without the "temptation" to harm other, innocent people first.

So go ahead and laugh, or call him nuts. But I don't think Footy's idea was so crazy. I'd throw in one caveat: that anyone who wanted to off themselves be given a psych test first. And if they're deemed mentally incompetent they be denied permission and hospitalized. But if they test clean and competent, then let them do their thing. Better that than frustrating them by denying their quest, so they can go home and plot on how to take revenge on the world or their neighbors before killing themselves.

It's messy. But I think it could fall into one of those lesser of two (or three, or four?) evils categories.