On April 17, 2009, Aaron B Xue, a 15-year-old freshman at Essex High School who was an honor roll student, a tennis player, and a cellist, shot and killed himself in a field near his home.

The weapon, according to his mother, Ge Wu, a professor in the University of Vermont’s Department of Rehabilitation and Movement Services, was left in the field for Aaron by another Essex High School teenager.

This other boy, Ge Wu said, was both a friend and a tormenter to her son. The other youth, she said, “frequently coerced Aaron, spread rumors about him, and threatened him.”

Essex police would not precisely confirm Ge Wu’s account of where Aaron got the gun, but did not dispute it, either. Captain Brad LaRose of the Essex Police Department said that because the investigation remains “open,” and concerns a juvenile, “the laws are very strict on releasing any information.”

But he did report that “the gun did not belong to (Aaron) or to his family.”

According to Ge Wu, the friend-tormenter actually left two guns, which had belonged to his late father, a State Police officer until his death some five years earlier. The boy also left ammunition for the weapons, she said.

In their grief, Ge Wu and her family did what parents who have lost children often do. They decided to memorialize their son by trying to prevent similar tragedies in the future. In their research, they discovered an ugly little fact about Vermont: its high teenage suicide rate.

As explained in Wednesday’s post (scroll down) Vermont has a relatively high suicide rate for people of all ages. But at least in comparison with most of its sister states in New England and neighboring New York, Vermont’s teen suicide rate is strikingly high.

According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, between 1987 and 2006,  2.12 of every hundred-thousand Vermonters under the age of 19 shot themselves to death. Maine’s rate was almost as high, but in the other New England states and New York, the rate was substantially lower. New Hampshire’s was 1.71. The others were less than one per  hundred-thousand. The rate in Massachusetts was only 0.42.

Ge Wu thinks she knows why: guns. Not only are they plentiful and all but unregulated in Vermont, but Vermont and Maine are the only two states in New England without a Child Access Prevention (CAP) law, requiring firearm owners to lock their weapons away from children when they know minors might have access to them.

So she decided to try to get one passed. With the help of professionals dealing with youth suicide, she formed Citizens for Safer Vermont Children and drafted proposed legislation labeled “Aaron’s Law.” One of her legislators, Linda Waite-Simpson, a Democrat of Essex Junction, introduced a bill last February, H. 737

It promptly went nowhere.

Well, it went to the Judiciary Committee, from where it went nowhere, and the committee chairman, Democrat William Lippert of Hinesburg, understands why, and how difficult further progress is likely to be.

“It would take grass roots organizing,” he said. When she came before the committee, we heard very powerful and emotional testimony. But I said to her, if and when this is taken up, it’s not a slam dunk. It’s filled with controversy because it touches on the issue of firearms, even though it is not a gun control bill. Those are the political realities as I see them.”

Lippert is right to see powerful opposition to “Aaron’s Law” from the influential gun lobby. Ed Cutler of Westminster, the chief legislative director and past president of Gun Owners of Vermont, said his organization has “serious problems with that bill.”

First, he said, “the lack of suicide and violence in this state” made the legislation unnecessary.

Worse, he said, “even kids should be able to defend themselves,” and passage of a CAP law could prevent people from getting to their weapons if they were attacked in their homes.

The only example he gave was Kimberly Cates, the Milford, N.H. woman who was murdered in her bed last October. Her 11-year-old daughter was tormented and seriously injured. The family had guns, Cutler said, but the woman’s husband, who was away on business, “had (the weapons) locked up and nobody could get to them.”

If this is Cutler’s best argument, he doesn’t have much of a case. According to the story in the Manchester Union Leader, Kimberly Cates was slain in her bed at 4AM by intruders who snuck into the house. There’s little reason to think that had her husband been home he wouldn’t have been just as fast asleep at that hour. Only taking a loaded gun to bed would have saved them.

This doesn’t mean that the case for a CAP law is airtight. In New Hampshire, which has such a law, the teen suicide rate by firearms was slightly higher than in Pennsylvania, which does not.

Furthermore, a case can be made that CAP advocates are overstating the extent of the danger. Nationally, suicide rates declined among 10-to-24 year-old males from 15.43 suicides per 100,000 in 1991 to 11.39 suicides per 100,000 in 2006, according to the CDC.

And while Vermont’s teen suicide rates are high, the actual numbers are small. IN 2007, the last year for which final statistics are available, four young Vermonters committed suicide, at least two of them with firearms.

The question is whether any of them might not have killed themselves had they not been able to get their hands on a gun. The answer, not from gun control advocates but from data-driven scientists, seems to be yes.

Daniel Webster, a health policy expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said an article that he and others published in the Journal of the American Medical Association “examined effects of CAP  (laws) on teen suicide, and found that they did indeed lower suicide risk for teens.”

It may be true that, as Cutler of the Gun Owners of Vermont said, “if (teens) really want to commit suicide, they’re going to find a way.” But studies show that most suicide attempters decide to kill themselves on impulse, an impulse that often fades before they complete the task. Most of those people don’t end up dying from suicide.

“Given these facts,” an article in New England Journal of  Medicine noted, “access to guns likely turns an impulse into a final decision.”

But those are only scientific facts. They may not prevail in the Vermont Legislature, where power – or perhaps, in this case, perceived power – often trumps mere data.

Note: There will be no post next Monday.