I disagree. Preventing suicide, even impulsive suicide, is impossible. I could enumerate all the ways I can see just looking around me but I don't want to ruin my day and yours. However, seeing that people are scared of this doesn't exactly make me think that society cares about me, it implies they're scared of how unhappy people are and have no idea what to do about it.
You are wrong. It is quite well established that blocking a specific method of suicide can prevent people from trying. What you say is true in a technical sense but is completely ignorant of the actual ways that humans behave.
Yes, it can block people from trying that specific method. I have no idea how you would measure the impact on preventing people from trying at all. Do you have a source? I'm curious about how they measured it.
>Anderson points to another example where simply making a change in people's access to instruments of suicide dramatically lowered the suicide rate. In England, death by asphyxiation from breathing oven fumes had accounted for roughly half of all suicides up until the 1970s, when Britain began converting ovens from coal gas, which contains lots of carbon monoxide, to natural gas, which has almost none. During that time, suicides plummeted roughly 30 percent — and the numbers haven't changed since.
It's a very important part, and you must have reducing access to means and methods if you want to reduce the numbers of people killing themselves.