Another alarming loophole

Mentally distressed people have too easy access to heights and natural landmarks. Why settle for concrete barriers and steel nets though; let's just dismantle the Brooklyn Bridge altogether. It's a machine of death that launches helpless souls into a violent, grisly death, and if it saves just one life, right?

Draper, of the suicide hot line network, said that popular opinion aside, research shows that barriers making the jumps from high places impossible will prevent the public suicides.

"Many people are under the impression that if you just put up a barrier they will find another way to kill themselves. It's an argument that people will make against putting up a barrier," Draper says. "And it's myth."

Seriously? Well then, what's stopping cities from emplacing safety devices on bridges and tall buildings to stop crazy people from jumping to their deaths?

Transportation authorities voted two years ago to hang stainless steel nets from the bridge to deter suicides, although funding for the $50 million project remains elusive.

Oh. Funding, that's usually a biggie. Seems people that run cities and all like to spend the public's hard earned bucks on keeping those bridges maintained so that they can be used for good things, like spanning rivers and such. And those large buildings, they hold offices and work space for thousands of workers that keep the country running.

Perhaps diverting "elusive" public funding away from what the bridges and buildings were initially designed to do -- facilitate public commerce for millions of people -- and re-direct it towards saving handfuls of people who have decided for whatever reason to fore go public commerce and use such things in a manner that they were not intended. . . . .yeah, I can see how that might not go over so well.

It sucks that people kill themselves. Even more so if it could be prevented. I just don't see the logic in padding the entire world to stop random people from being random. The entire argument can go full idiot, like making Tylenol bottles harder to open when you're sad, or making guns sense distress and lock up, or carbon dioxide sensors on your Flowmasters that shut off the engine so you can't poison yourself to death in your garage. There's also the unintended consequences of it all; I can guarantee you that the first time some diseased seagull gets stuck in one of those safety nets, thousands of animal activists will picket city hall to have them removed.

I still say that people will find a way to kill themselves once they commit to it. Spending millions to make the world safer for a small amount of people will not stop it.