The United States National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 is now also, as of Saturday, also available at 988, the result of a national push to expand access to mental health emergency care, the Associated Press reports. Americans experiencing a crisis can call or text the new short and much easier to remember number to be connected with a counselor.

Suicide takes the lives of tens of thousands of Americans a year, more than half of them via firearms due to the convenience and painlessness of a self-inflicted bullet to the head, as well the ease of following through on the impulse – as opposed to tying a noose, waiting for a freight train, or whatever other means requiring more time, effort, and/or pain inflicted on a person committing suicide. There’s a strong relationship between a state’s gun laws and its per capita suicide rate. For example, the Giffords Center gives California an “A” and Wyoming an “F” on its 2021 annual gun law scorecard – mapping very neatly onto the 10 per 100,000 suicide deaths in California to Wyoming’s 30 in 2020. These numbers don’t lie, no matter what you think about gun policy.

Most of the talk about tackling America’s gun problem is focused on the wanton violence armed psychopaths have wrought on innocent people, and not wrongly so. It would’ve been great if Bobby Crimo, Salvador Ramos, and Peyton Gendron had just blasted themselves instead of 40 people between the three of them. But hidden in the backdrop is the epidemic of self-inflicted gun violence, which is more prevalent than gun homicide – 19,384 people were murdered with a gun in the US in 2020, while 24,292 died of self-inflicted gunshots. The bottom line is that effective gun control policy is effective suicide prevention policy. Seriously taking it on would do much more to save the lives of those suffering from a crisis than just shortening one phone number.