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.

In 2006, 13 people were murdered in Vermont, a rate of 2.7 people per hundred-thousand residents, the standard measurement for these matters, far below the national rate (5.6 per hundred-thousand that year) and one of the lowest rates in the country.

Kind of high for Vermont, though, The previous year’s rate had been 2.1 per hundred-thousand, based on eight murders. Thing haven’t changed much since. In fact, except for 1993, when for some reason there were 21 murders in the state, the number of homicides fluctuates between the high single digits and the mid-teens, allowing Vermont to uphold its reputation as a safe, healthy, state where, compared with most other states, people do not kill.

A reputation not entirely deserved. Vermonters rarely kill someone else. But they are quite a bit more likely than other Americans to kill themselves.

That same year of 2006 (chosen because it is the most recent year for which reliable suicide statistics are available), when only a handful of Vermonters killed another person, 80 committed suicide, a rate of 13.1 per hundred-thousand, according to the Suicide Prevention Resource Center. Here, Vermont’s statistics are worse than the nation as  whole, where 11.1 people per hundred-thousand population killed themselves that year.

For whatever reason, suicide seems to be a worse problem in Vermont than in the neighboring states. New Hampshire’s 12.2 per hundred-thousand is slightly lower, and still above the national average. But in Massachusetts (7.2 per hundred-thousand) and New York (6.7), the rate is far lower than in most of the rest of the country,

From 1995 through 2006,  the SPRC reported, Vermont had a 13.7 per hundred-thousand suicide rate, with an average of 1.5 suicides a week, making suicide the ninth leading cause of death in the state. It is eleventh nationally.

“Things have not changed that much,” since those statistics were compiled, said Elana Premack Sandler, a Prevention Specialist at SPRC’s Boston office. Vermont remains one of the states where a person is more likely to kill him or her self.

Probably himself. As in most other states, the vast majority of Vermont suicides – 82 percent — are men, meaning that 23 of every hundred-thousand Vermont men take their own lives, making suicide the seventh leading cause of death of Vermont men. The rate for women was 4.8 per hundred-thousand.

As might be expected, older people were most likely to take their own lives. In Vermont, the rate for those over 70 was 19.6 per hundred-thousand (43 for males over 70). But suicide experts in Vermont and elsewhere are increasingly worried about teenage suicides. The SPRC reported four youth suicides in Vermont in 2006, a slightly higher rate than the nation’s as a whole.

As might not be expected, there does not seem to be a correlation between suicide and either income or education. Nationally (this hardly applies in Vermont), non-Hispanic whites are more likely to take their own lives than are blacks or Hispanics.

“Income and socio-economic class does not really enter into it,” said Brian Remer, project manager for youth suicide prevention at the Center for Health and Learning in Brattleboro.http://www.healthandlearning.org/

“There’s a myth out there that people who are poor and down on their luck might be more inclined to take their own lives. It’s more a combination of a lot of different factors.”

The most important of these, he said, is probably “social isolation,” which helps explain why, in Vermont and around the country, suicide is more common in rural areas. Nationally, New Mexico (19.8 suicides per hundred thousand population from 1995 through 2005), Alaska (21), and Montana (20) are the states with the highest rates, Elana Premack Sandler said.

In some of these states, the rate might be affected by the one exception to the general rule that non-Hispanic whites are more likely to take their own lives than are members of a minority group. Not if the minority group is American Indians or Alaska natives. In Alaska, the suicide rate for these two groups is a frightening 45.9 per hundred-thousand.

In these cases, poverty and other pathologies such as alcoholism might contribute to the suicide rate. But Premack Sandler said most experts still regard isolation as the biggest problem.

The same holds in Vermont, said Remer. The suicide rate in rural Essex County in the Northeast Kingdom is higher than Alaska’s – 24 per hundred-thousand. Essex County residents are poorer and less educated than most Vermonters, but Remer said, “suicide rates are probably higher in rural areas because of isolation and the difficulty receiving or getting to mental health services” than to income or education levels. Mental health, he said, “plays a part in about 90 percent of the suicides.”

And while there are no statistics about rural attitudes as such, suicide experts are convinced that the stigma attached to mental illness, which seems stronger in rural areas, prevents some people from dealing with the problems that can lead to suicide.

“The stigma is a big thing,” Remer said. “If a son or daughter exhibits unusual behavior, parents often think, ‘maybe they inherited this condition from me,’ or ‘I’m a bad parent, or people will think I’m a bad parent.’ We know this is not true. Mental illness often has a chemical or genetic base, and people can get real help from therapy and medication.”

Bill Lippert, the Democratic State Representative from Hinesburg who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, noted that though there were “twice as many suicides as murders in Vermont” (actually, more than twice as many), every murder garners a massive headline, but the issue of suicide is generally not receiving the same level of public awareness because there’s still the stigma attached to mental illness.”

But mental illness is only one aspect of the suicide discussion that many experts and activists are reluctant to discuss. The other is the method, though the data are clear. People can take their lives using all kinds of devices including poisons, knives, and suffocation. But in Vermont and nationwide, more than half of all suicides shoot themselves.

That’s what Aaron Xue did last year. He was 15. He apparently was given a gun (or perhaps guns) by another youth, who took them from his home in Essex, where Aaron also lived. Aaron’s mother thinks it should be simple to pass a law that would make it less likely that teenagers could take loaded guns from home. She may be wrong.