This veteran and advocate know the toll too well. Join them for talk on suicide, firearms.

If you or someone you know is dealing with suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text "Hopeline" to the National Crisis Text Line at 741-741.

Debi Traeder knew in her gut that her friend's life depended on someone temporarily taking away his six rifles.

Temporarily is the operative word, but often, Second Amendment advocates hear only the first part: They want to take away my guns. But Traeder, who chairs the nonprofit Prevent Suicide Marathon County, knows that when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis, it is important they do not have easy access to a firearm.

Her friend got mad at the idea, Traeder recalled, but she and her husband remained vigilant. The friend's basement needed some tidying up anyway, she said, which helped encourage him to allow the temporary purge of his guns. It wouldn't be forever, Traeder insisted, just until "things settle down."

In the intervening year, he established a strong family support system, his crisis passed and he's been able to use his guns during hunting season. But things could have taken a dangerous turn if she didn't have a hard conversation.

Traeder expects a similar frank discussion on Thursday when gun owners, advocates and others gather for a free event, “At the Intersection of Firearms and Mental Health" at the UW Center for Civic Engagement in Wausau. Doors open at 6 p.m. and the program begins at 6:30 p.m. There will be refreshments, firearms accessory giveaways, and informational tables. The event will also be live-streamed on the Journal Sentinel's website, www.jsonline.com.

Register for free tickets: At the Intersection of Firearms and Mental Health

One group hosting an information table is Never Forgotten Honor Flight, a Wausau-based organization that flies U.S. veterans who have served before May 7, 1975, to visit memorials built in their name. The town hall speaks to a long overdue conversation, said retired Lt. Col. Jim Campbell, co-founder and vice president of marketing of the group.

"I think the bottom-line concern, especially when it's coming out of the political arena, is that it goes right off the page to Second Amendment rights," Campbell said. "Or it goes right off the page to if my neighbor thinks I'm a little wacky, he can make a phone call and someone's going to show up and take all my guns away. Is that realistic? No. But that's not how they think."

Suicides most common fatality associated with firearms

Suicides are far and away the most common type of fatality associated with guns, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis of Wisconsin health data led by Journal Sentinel reporter John Diedrich, which found that suicides account for more than 70% of all fatal shootings. And the number of gun suicides in the state has only grown over the last two years, exceeding 500 deaths in 2022 — the highest number in at least 30 years, according to the latest data from the state Department of Health Services.

What's more, the regions with the most gun suicides per capita are largely rural, indicating a need for more awareness, educational campaigns and a focus on safety.

Firearms are the most common and the most lethal means of suicide. Research shows that roughly 90% of people who attempt to take their life die when their means is a firearm, a troubling statistic all its own. But research also shows that if someone attempts suicide but survives, a small minority, one in 10, of those people go on to die by suicide.

Guns and mental health are taboos. They are focus of a Journal Sentinel event Thursday.

"There's nothing wrong with owning a gun. We just want to create a culture of safety when it comes to the guns," said Traeder, who has lived around firearms her entire life. "Getting the help and getting the understanding, getting the awareness — somebody might not even realize they're at that point until it's pointed out to them, or the opportunity presents itself. And we don't want that opportunity to present itself."

Part of Traeder's mission is to get gun owners to hear her when she says this is about putting safety measures in place during times of crisis — the way you wouldn't leave medicine lying in reach of children to grab and swallow.

Thursday's town hall is the first public event following the award-winning "Behind the Gun" series led by Diedrich, who pitched the project in early 2022 and dove headlong into the work from August 2023 onward. It was "a feat of reporting," said Greg Borowski, executive editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

"The Behind the Gun project … showed, for the first time, the extent and nature of gun deaths across our state," Borowski said. "It was marked by listening and a search for practical solutions. That's what we want to continue with this event."

For one veteran, mental health and gun ownership is critical combo

Campbell, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served from 1966 to 1996, has seen firsthand the way post-traumatic stress can overtake a person's life. He's loath to call post-traumatic stress a disorder, as it is commonly referred, because he's seen the night-and-day transformation that can occur when a veteran experiences closure after decades of nightmares.

For Campbell, it's about establishing healthy interventions, which sometimes look like group therapy and sometimes look like a Vietnam veteran recognizing names on the Vietnam Memorial wall in D.C.

Last year, Campbell talked with the son of a Vietnam War veteran with serious post-traumatic stress who said such an encounter — seeing his name, his friend's names, his company's name on the wall — changed his mind about taking his own life.

Not every veteran gets such a timely intervention. Campbell is quick to point out that a veteran dies by suicide nearly every hour, or 17.5 per day as of 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, with firearms being the most common form of veteran suicide, at 72%. (Gun suicide among non-veterans, by comparison, was 52%.)

But Campbell, himself a proud gun owner and a member of the National Rifle Association, said that, undergirding a gun owner's reluctance to reach out for mental health support, is the fear that somebody's going to take their guns away and put them on a red-flag list.

He's also aware that broaching a conversation about how owners should store and manage their guns will make some "extremely irate." Part of why he's attending Thursday's panel is to offer his unique perspective, as someone who owns guns, pushed for more mental health support for veterans and has, for the last quarter of a century, taught firearm and hunter safety courses.

Through his Honor Flight work and as a member of the Marathon County Veterans Coalition, he knows how important it is to work through those feelings. He's lost too many fellow veterans to gun suicide who didn't exhibit outward signs of suicidal ideation, such as the Wausau veteran motorcyclists Campbell would join on joy rides who behaved "totally normally" only to take their own lives the following week.

"It's devastating. Just devastating. If we can save just one life, it's worth taking something like this up," Campbell said.

Lockboxes and gun locks act as a deterrent to death by suicide with firearms

Traeder, from Prevent Suicide Marathon County, often talks about the life-saving power of 15 seconds. That's about as long as it takes to lock up a gun. Removing quick access can discourage impulsive decisions, which is significant because one in four survivors of suicide in a study out of Houston said they deliberated gun suicide for less than five minutes.

She is also quick to point out that if you know where you keep your gun in the house, the chances are high that so does your child.

Gun locks can serve as a deterrent, which is why, as part of Thursday's town hall, Traeder will be giving away about 100 gun locks. She'll bring what she doesn't give away to local police departments to distribute.

Like Campbell, she knows the topic of guns can bring up a lot of heavy emotions quickly. And she invites gun owners with those strong feelings to come to Thursday's panel, too.

"As a gun owner, or someone that knows a gun owner, it's all of our responsibility to care about each other," Traeder said. "There's many means to die by suicide, but this is one that is in our midst."

Natalie Eilbert covers mental health issues for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. She welcomes story tips and feedback. You can reach her at neilbert@gannett.com or view her Twitter profile at @natalie_eilbert.

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: A panel on firearms and mental health in Wausau by and for gunowners