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SPRINGFIELD, Mo. â Kindall Johnson woke up early that October Saturday to get to his fraternityâs Homecoming Day tailgate. On the way out the door of his parentsâ house, he shouted a goodbye to his mother, Kathy Davis: âLove ya, Ma!â Davis watched her 22-year-old son, the youngest of her three boys, jog out to his car and leave, like he did any other day. He would never return. Johnson, not even a year out of the Marine Corps, a student struggling to readjust to civilian life, went to the tailgate but skipped the football game at Missouri State University in Springfield. Instead, he drove to the parking lot of a police station and shot himself twice in the chest. ....
Kaitlin Washburn and Lisa Gutierrez, The Kansas City Star Kindall Johnson woke up early that October Saturday to get to his fraternity’s Homecoming Day tailgate. On the way out the door of his parents’ house, he shouted a goodbye to his mother, Kathy Davis: “Love ya, Ma!” Davis watched her 22-year-old son, the youngest of her three boys, jog out to his car and leave, like he did any other day. He would never return. Johnson, not even a year out of the Marine Corps, a student struggling to readjust to civilian life, went to the tailgate but skipped the football game at Missouri State University in Springfield. Instead, he drove to the parking lot of a police station and shot himself twice in the chest. ....
“I don’t think that the gun had anything to do with it,” Davis said. Yet, research shows that easy access to a firearm can be deadly. “There’s a lot of factors leading to this epidemic, but the most important one is guns,” said Chris Marvin, who served for seven years as a U.S. Army officer and Black Hawk helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. He currently sits on the Everytown Veterans Advisory Council. “It’s so clear that the gun is a leading reason why we have a suicide crisis.” When people think about suicide among veterans, Marvin said, they tend to blame it on the trauma of combat. But many veterans, like Johnson, never saw any fighting. ....