I was very nearly a gun violence statistic when I was a teenager; twice in fact. The first one was while I was out hunting with my dad somewhere around 10 years old.
We were creeping through some brush chasing a rabbit when a small convoy of coyote hunters came blitzing across a nearby field, apparently missed our orange hats and started firing indiscriminately into the brush.
I could hear bullets whizzing past my head, my dad threw me to the ground and fired a shot in the air. The guys stopped shooting my dad threw down his gun and had some loud words with them.
The second time was when I was contemplating suicide at around 16. Trigger warning for details.
I was a fat, isolated kid who had not fully hit puberty yet. My parents, by that time, had fallen on hard drug use and were constantly hurting each other.
We moved from house to house, chased out by landlords when we didn't pay rent, or when they noticed the squalor we were living in.
After being bullied particularly hard one day at school I went home, put a slug into the shotgun I kept by my bed (welcome to rural Iowa), knelt on the floor and put the barrel in my mouth.
I was pretty short, so I struggled to reach the trigger, eventually I grabbed something nearby to press it. When I did, nothing happened. It was a single shot hammer fired shotgun and I hadn't pulled the hammer back.
I sat there and cried for a while, and then my cat came over and rubbed up against me. I unloaded the gun and cried in bed the rest of the night.
It's been 20 years now and I never seriously contemplated suicide from that point on. I'm happy and relatively healthy now, I escaped the hell I grew up in a couple of years later and never looked back.
I share this to say shame on anyone in this thread (and I've seen a lot of it) who says that suicide was "going to happen anyway".
I almost made a horrible mistake because I was a young child who felt (and essentially was) helpless to solve some serious problems in my life and had what I felt was an easy solution to hand.
When you're in a well of depression it can be hard to see any possibilities but the bleakest, but that is not reality. There is almost always a better way forward and any extra second to consider the finality of suicide is a chance to prevent it.