A proper suicide.

Do you know what the most important part of shooting yourself is? It's making sure you pierce the brain stem. Otherwise you could end up in a coma, or retarded. All information to and from the body passes through the brain stem. Thus if you destroy or severely damage the brain stem you have nearly guaranteed death.

A 9 millimeter bullet travels at roughly 1100 feet per second. An average human skull is a quarter of an inch thick and made of material not know for it's bullet resistant properties thus a 9 millimeter bullet will pierce a human skull the vast majority of the time. Sometimes they don't though, but those freak occurences can be attributed to variable in distance, gunpowder and angle. Needless to say though, if you put a gun up to your head and press the trigger, every ammunition manufacturer in the world will bet top dollar on penetration.

Penetration however does not guarantee a kill. See there's lots of parts of your brain that aren't neccesarily vital to survival in our modern world. For instance, if you were to damage or destroy your cerebellum and hypothetically speaking don't suffer any other terminal damage to other parts of the brain, and survive the blood loss, you would still have many happy years to live. You will suffer from a loss of coordinated motor movement, inability to judge distance, weak muscles and a tendency to fall. Certainly though, none of these symptons would be life ending in today's world. Now if you were to travel back in time and suffer a similar injury you would most certainly die from your inability to hunt or gather.

Today's modern world though would care for you, because it legally has to. Well in most civilized countries anyways. I suppose there are still parts of the world where you would pretty much still die from an inability to hunt or gather. If you are one of the lucky three billion people living in a civilized nation though, rest assured you will not die. You may spend the rest of your life wishing you would but you won't. The government will even pay you for your disability and give you the best parking anywhere you want to go! Assuming you are still able to drive and not trapped in a wheeled or matressed prison.

This is why correct handgun suicidal methodoly is so important. You are killing yourself which means you have failed yourself, your family or the world and the only way to prove you are not a complete failure is to do it right. Think of how embarrasing it would be to fail at killing yourself. Now keep in mind, there are plenty of other ways to kill yourself and most are far easier to accomplish for people without a handgun at their disposal. I would like to point out though that the vast majority of non-firearm suicidal techniques are subject to critical failures.

Take for instance slashing your wrists. It sounds very final and has the plus side of leaving you intact and not disfigured. This is very important for struggling artists who wish to leave some type of message to the world, or highly emotional people who suffer from the delusion that their death will be beautiful or sentimental in some way. Slashing your wrists however is even worse than stuffing obscene amounts of random pills into your mouth for killing yourself. It has a notoriously low success rate due to blood clotting and meddlesome friends or family members. Think of how embarrasing it would be to have someone find you and then call the paramedics or to wake up a few hours later really weak but far from dead. Besides embarrasment this is going to cause anger and resentment at yourself, the primary reasons why you're killing yourself in the first place. Inevitably you are going to be put under suicide watch and forced into counseling to talk about your feelings. If you wanted to talk about your feelings you probably wouldn't be killing yourself. Now imagine the frustration of being completely unable to kill yourself due to the intervention of large hospital orderlies and heavy sedation. You don't need that kind of stress.

Hence I am a fierce advocate of suicide by firearm. It is the only feasible method of killing yourself where you can control all the variables and eliminate the vast majority of x-factors. The following are key to a success when utilizing a firearm for self-termination: trajectory, velocity, distance and location. Thanks to the wonderful human-destroying efforts of firearms and ammunition producers the velocity variable has been taken care of for you. Bullets today are being propelled with more force and greater velocity than ever before. The odds of penetrating your skull and killing yourself are firmly in your favor.

Distance however is the second most important variable in the suicide equation after velocity. Any object travelling through the air is going to be affected by friction which will cause a non-powered projectile such as a bullet to lose velocity over time. So unless you are committing suicide in space, and have developed a way to fire a firearm without oxygen, you need to consider the distance variable very carefully. The rule of thumb is that the closer you place the bullet to your skull, the less velocity it will bleed off until impact, and the greater the penetration force will be. This explains why putting a gun right next to your head is the most preffered method of firearm suicide.

Trajectory is the third most important variable in firearm suicide. You might wonder why its third and not first, but keep in mind that without the proper velocity and distance it won't matter what you're aiming at if the bullet can't penetrate or even get to it's target. With proper velocity and distance however you can get a bullet inside your skull and have a great chance of killing yourself, even if you don't hit what you're aiming at. We don't want to take chances however, which is why we chose a firearm as our suicide choice in the first place.

Now there are several parts of your brain which are very vital to life, however as we learned earlier there are many more parts which aren't. What might have killed you a few hundred years ago just won't cut it anymore. This is why I recommend a trajectory which will pierce and destroy the brain stem. Without a functional brain stem, the rest of the brain is doomed to death. Signals that tell your heart to beat and your lungs to breathe will not be received by these organs, and much like employees on yearly salary they will loaf around and do absolutely nothing without orders. Without your lungs breathing, carbon dioxide will not be exhaled and replaced with oxygen. Without your heart beating your blood will not deliver fresh oxygen to your vital organs. The essential mechanics of your body will cease and you will die. Best of all no current medical technology can repair a destroyed brain stem.

The last variable is location. Location is highly important and something that is not often given much thought to. A good location can cancel out two of the most common suicide foilers: meddlesome friends or family and infuriatingly efficent medical personnel. Thus it is imperative to your success that you choose the proper location. Ideally it should be a place that is difficult to get to, or it should contain obstacles that will impede other people from reaching you. If you can see, hear or feel people around you then it's probably not a secure enough place to end your life. Two popular places, abandoned buildings and empty fields, should be carefully considered for hidden dangers. An abandoned building might contain homeless people or a criminal element, and an empty field may contain dangerous wildlife. Remember, you want to kill yourself not get griveously hurt, raped or mauled.

Congratulations, you are now properly equipped with the tools needed to succesfuly terminate your own life. You may be a failure in many different ways but now you can rest easy knowing that when you decide enough is enough you will not fail in your most important decision. Remember, death is inevitable and though some may call you weak or cowardly for taking your life consider this: science knows absolutely nothing about the human consciousness after bodily failure. You my friend are the ultimate explorer, standing before an inky black abyss which no scientific instrument has ever pierced.