Good article. The problem is, suicide prevention in general is hard. Somebody could be a perfectly normal, responsible person with a very good reason to keep a gun around. There's no reason he/she shouldn't have one. Then, of all sudden, a hard time comes (bad luck in love, job loss) and nobody other than the closest friends/relatives can do much about it or even notice, and sometimes not even them. A gun makes suicides easier and less survivable, but it's just a part of a much bigger, much more important problem. No amount of gun safety training is gonna help here, unless you get safety regs drilled in so hard that the idea of pointing a gun in an unsafe direction becomes inconceivable. Also, the state can't really do much in this case, at least not without also depriving legitimate gun owners of their weapons, simply because there's no difference between a legitimate owner and a suicidal person until a short time before the attempt. Mandatory gun cabinets and awareness campaigns are a good idea, but pretty much the extent of what the Government can do. Still, this is treating the symptoms, not the cause. Same as building tall fences around bridges, that does help make suicide more of a chore (in turn reducing the rates by giving people more time to think, among other things), but isn't a solution to the (much bigger and more complex) problem.
Oh, and banning large mags, pistol grips and other tacticool stuff isn't gonna help in that case. A gun's a gun in that case, it's only slightly more difficult to shoot oneself with a rifle than a handgun, unless we're talking antiquated long rifles (you know, like the old Lee-Enfield with a 767mm long barrel). So unless we're gonna limit the people to 100 years old long long rifle designs, limiting specific kinds of weapons isn't gonna help much.
