In a land awash in guns, who protects the protectors?
She leaned out of the tent at a small-town summer festival, hoping someone would stop to ask about her tattoos, her T-shirt, the framed pictures of her son on a table in the back of the booth.
Barbie Rohde has made herself a walking billboard for this cause. She feels called to say the words, as much as they sometimes rattle the people who stop at her booth: “veteran suicide.”
A man in an Army cap recoiled and walked away. His wife said she was sorry, he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and struggles to speak of it.
“I worry for him and for us every day,” she said.
Rohde reached underneath her display tables, grabbed a gun lock and wrapped it in a blue bandana, printed with the phone number for the Department of Veterans Affairs crisis line: call 988, press 1.
“Here’s some free goodies for you,” she said, and tucked it discreetly into the bag with two T-shirts the woman bought.
Rohde runs the most active chapter of a nonprofit called Mission 22, aimed at ending the scourge of military and veteran suicide, which kills thousands every year, at a rate far higher than the general population. Three-quarters of those who take their own lives use guns.
One of them was her 25-year-old son, Army Sgt. Cody Bowman.
For decades, discussions of suicide prevention skirted fraught questions about firearms, experts say, and the Army has not implemented measures that might be controversial. But a growing conviction has taken hold, among researchers, the VA, ordinary people like Rohde: If America wants to get serious about addressing an epidemic of suicide, it must find a way to honor veterans, respect their rights to own a gun, but keep it out of their hands on their darkest days.
![A raffle stand with a sign showing that an AR-15 is the prize.](images/TXDG314.webp)
![A fair stall with toys and a boy reaching for a toy machinegun.](images/TXDG313-2.webp)
Rohde travels to towns all over conservative, gun-loving east Texas. At this festival, the Marine Corps booth down the street was auctioning off an AR-15 to raise money for a children’s charity. She passed a toy booth, where a popular item was a plastic version of the rifle. She stopped to visit a friend who hands out free gun locks to anyone who buys his T-shirts, some supporting former President Donald Trump, others that declare: “God. Guns. Coffee.”
This is a place where people believe deeply in the Second Amendment, that guns are fundamental to the identity of the nation, that guns protect their families. And Rohde believes that, too — except, sometimes, the tool you thought would protect you might be what destroys you.
She tells her story to anyone who will listen: She had been worried about her son. Most of his left hand had been blown off in a training accident. He told his mom he didn’t know if he could continue his military career, and all he’d ever wanted to be was a soldier. He asked for his guns, which she had been holding. She’d hesitated. But they were his, and this is Texas.
Then one day, she got home from work waiting tables. She heard a car, looked out the window and saw men in military dress uniforms heading toward her house.
“Your son Sgt. Cody Bowman died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” they said. For the rest of the day, Rohde sat on the floor and screamed.
She didn’t eat for six days. She decided she wanted to be with her son.
She sat on her couch, crushed up sleeping pills, put them in a Blue Moon and drank it down. She guesses that subconsciously she didn’t want to die because she called a friend, who alerted her husband and she woke up in the hospital.
So when people say that if a person doesn’t have a gun, they’ll find some other way, she disagrees. She tried, and she lived.
Her son didn’t get that second chance.
Now her life is consumed with this volunteer work, so that when she visits her son’s grave, she can whisper all the things she’s done in his name, to spare another mother this agony, to make him proud of her.
“I’m glad I didn’t have a gun. Because if I would have had a gun, I believe I’d have finished the job. I need to be here, I still have a lot to do,” she said.
“And I wish Cody wouldn’t have had a gun.”
![Barbie Rohde holding a photo of her son, Army Sgt. Cody Bowman.](images/TXDG302-2.webp)
Barbie Rohde is a conservative, a devoted fan of Trump. She doesn’t like phrases like “gun control” and doesn’t believe in mandated gun restrictions. But something more needs to be done, she thinks.
“I truly believe that having such ready access to weapons is a big problem, the easy access for our military who are suffering,” she said. “That's not a popular opinion for me to have. And I don't care because that's what I believe.”
Others believe this now, too.
The VA invited Joe Bartozzi, the president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, to speak to health care providers at a conference on suicide in 2020. Bartozzi was nervous. He worried things might devolve into the heated debates he’s gotten used to: either guns are bad or guns are great, and there’s nothing in between.
But that didn’t happen. The doctors really wanted to know about firearms, how to talk to patients without it sounding like a gun grab — and what the industry could do to help.
“It’s a big change for us to be talking so directly about firearms,” said Matt Miller, who runs the VA’s suicide prevention efforts. The data had become too obvious to ignore any longer: the vast majority of people who attempt suicide do not die. A tiny fraction, only about 5% of people attempting suicide, use a gun. But guns are deadly almost every time, and so end up accounting for over half of suicide deaths. For veterans, that jumps to 75%.
Experts say that traumatic experiences at war play a role in veterans having a suicide rate 1.5 times higher than others. Yet even those with no combat history die by suicide at a much higher rate. What they have in common, researchers say, is demographics that are especially vulnerable to suicide: predominately white men with access to and a familiarity with firearms.
The military tasked a panel of researchers with recommending solutions. In February, that committee issued a 115-page report, including gun-safety measures like waiting periods on military property and raising the minimum age for servicemembers to buy guns to 25.
“We’re not trying to take people’s guns, we’re trying to prevent people from killing themselves,” said Dr. Craig Bryan, a veteran and Ohio State University psychologist who was on the panel. “I say it's possible to value Second Amendment rights and also be willing to prevent suicide. Those two things can coexist.”
But the Defense Department punted on endorsing the gun restrictions, creating another panel to study them instead.
Gun suicides in the United States reached an all-time high last year, Johns Hopkins University found. The debate about guns usually centers on homicides and mass shootings, but: suicides account for more than half of American gun deaths. Policy changes — like requiring permits, waiting periods, red flag laws — actually do more to prevent suicide than homicides, researchers say.
![Robert Rohde mowing the lawn](images/TXDG307.webp)
The biggest misconception, Bryan said, is that guns aren’t the problem. If someone doesn’t have a gun, people assume, they will find another way to end their life.
Suicide is an impulsive act. Research has shown that three-quarters of people move from thought to action within an hour. For 24%, it’s less than five minutes.
“And what they reach for is the greatest predictor of whether they will live or die,” Bryan said. Intentional overdoses, for example, end in death in 2% of attempts — it is slow, there is time to get help. Suicidal people, given a chance to change their mind, usually do, Bryan said.
When the District of Columbia put barriers on a bridge many jumped from, some scoffed: there was another bridge in eyesight, people would just jump there instead. But they didn’t. Bridge suicides dropped to almost nothing. In the United Kingdom, a particular drug became a common way people killed themselves. Lawmakers mandated a change in the packaging, making it more time-consuming to open. Suicides plummeted.
Bryan calls it “strategic inconvenience.”
The VA is now working with Bartozzi’s gun lobby; they set up suicide prevention booths at gun shows, encourage gun shops and ranges to offer to store firearms in a time of crisis, encourage responsible storage at home — anything Bartozzi said, to “put distance between the thought and the trigger.”
That’s why Barbie Rohde sneaks gun locks into her customers’ bags. A representative from the VA told her that they met a soldier who had decided to end her life and went for her gun. But it was locked. By the time she found the key, the impulse passed. She decided to stay alive, and the military officers did not have to knock on her parents’ door to repeat the horrible script Rohde endured.
But in Kingsport, Tennessee, the Fox family heard the car pull into the driveway.