The left has played a lot of games with gun control, as a term. Once, they fully embraced it and actively pushed for it. Then people got skittish, and so they started using euphemisms like "gun safety."
Over at Psychology Today, it seems that this isn't just approved of by at least one of their columnists, but is being touted as some kind of solution to suicide. Yes, really.
I wish I were making this up, but after columnist John Batesman, whose column seemed to be named "Goodbye, Suicide," literally says as much. After citing polls that claim most Americans want some level of gun control, Batesman argues:
The key when talking about reducing gun suicides isn’t to ask “What do you think of gun control?” People either support it or oppose it, and are entrenched in their opinion. The question to ask instead is, “How do we solve the problem of gun suicides?”
Most gun owners want guns to be used responsibly, but don’t want to be told to stop owning guns. For this reason, it’s important, when talking about curbing the proliferation of firearms to reduce the number of firearm-related suicides, to frame it as “gun reform,” not “gun control.” This is more than a matter of semantics: “Gun control” is perceived as limiting gun ownership while the focus of “gun reform” is seen as making sure that measures are in place so that people who have guns use them responsibly.
In other words, he doesn't see any problem with an effort to curtail a constitutionally protected right--in fact, in the very next column, he takes issue with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's argument that public safety concerns shouldn't factor into discussions of gun rights--and instead thinks the way to play this is to just soften the term describing it.
In other words, the American people are too stupid to see that "gun reform," "gun safety," and "gun violence prevention," are all terms that mean the exact same thing, which is gun control.
And what does this have to do with suicides? Absolutely nothing, other than at least half of all so-called gun deaths being suicides. That's it.
Never mind that suicidal people can pass background checks most of the time, and that while many Americans don't support mentally ill people having guns, there's a big difference between various mental illnesses, and most of those who said yes were thinking things like schizophrenia, not depression.
This is nothing more than someone claiming to care about people taking their own lives, yet thinking the solution to stopping that is word games that anyone with more than half a neuron firing in their brain will see through.
Granted, that excludes the whole of the left, but they're on board with gun control anyway, so that doesn't really matter.
I swear, it's like these people manufacture ways to sound more stupid to anyone other than their progressive buddies, all while pretending to be the smartest folks in any given room.
I'm pretty sure the houseplants have all of these people beaten in that department.