Shasta County, a rugged expanse of timber and lakes in northern California, has the state’s highest rates of both suicide and gun ownership — a deadly combination that clinicians, local politicians and bereaved families are struggling to break. In 2022, the county’s suicide rate hit an all-time high of 33.3 per 100,000 people, triple California’s statewide average. Guns were the most common method. While the rate has since decreased, it remains more than double the state figure, and the numbers for 2024 show an increase of about a third from the previous year, with 43 suicides recorded.
For Kelly Rocha, that statistic became personal one night in 2019. Her father, Bill Rocha, a contractor and avid hunter who kept several rifles in a safe and another firearm unlocked in his car, went out to his truck and killed himself. She had missed two voicemails from his wife; it was her own mother who delivered the news after midnight. “I couldn’t believe it,” she recalled. Looking back, the signs were there: anxiety, depression and alcoholism run in the family, and her father was the third man in the Rocha line to die by suicide. He was also a gun owner, like many men in Shasta County. “I know my kids are gonna have a tendency to become alcoholics. From here on out, my goal is to stop that. Suicide should stop with my dad,” Kelly said. “I think we need to talk about it more.”
The data behind the crisis
Three-quarters of the people who died by suicide in Shasta County in 2024 were men, and nearly every one of them used a firearm. Across the wider region, the UC Davis BulletPoints Project reported that in 2024, 41% of households along the northern coast owned firearms, 35% in and around the upper Sierra mountain range, and 44% in the north San Joaquin valley. By contrast, only 22% of households in urban areas such as Los Angeles and the Bay Area owned firearms that year. In Shasta County itself, approximately 80% of all firearm deaths are suicides, and nearly half of all suicides are committed with a gun. Between 2001 and 2015, the county logged the state’s highest per capita gun sales total, registering 6,460 sales per 100,000 residents.
From 2021 to 2023, Shasta County recorded 147 suicide deaths, with men accounting for 86% of them (127 men and 20 women). The age-adjusted suicide death rate for 2020–2022 averaged 26.3 per 100,000, still more than double California’s rate of 10.5. Veterans have been particularly affected: 62 suicides among veterans were recorded in the county between 2017 and 2022. Youth are also at risk, though data for 15–24-year-olds in Shasta are suppressed due to low numbers; statewide, the youth suicide rate was 8.7 per 100,000, well below the national figure of 14.2. In Shasta, those aged 70 and older also represent a significant share of suicide deaths.
Based on these numbers, it is tempting to conclude that tighter gun restrictions would lower the suicide rate. Public health data has shown that interventions such as extreme risk protection orders (also known as gun violence restraining orders) — which allow family members and law enforcement to petition for temporary restrictions on a person’s ability to buy or possess a firearm if they pose a danger to themselves or others — have been successful at preventing suicides. But in Shasta, gun ownership is so deeply ingrained in local political and cultural identity that public health officials worry that simply discouraging gun ownership would be ineffective and would deter people from seeking help.
A different approach: ‘means safety’
Instead, Shasta’s public health team has been focusing on a strategy called “means safety”. The idea is to distance a potentially suicidal person from lethal means — such as large amounts of medication that could lead to an overdose, or easy access to a loaded and unlocked gun — by creating time and distance between the impulse and the act. Amy Barnhorst, associate director of the Centers for Violence Prevention at the University of California, Davis, and director of the BulletPoints Project, explains that the strategy is designed to fit the realities of life in Shasta: geographic isolation, a lack of mental health infrastructure, disproportionate levels of poverty, poorly funded social services — and a high rate of gun ownership. It also aligns with local values of self-sufficiency, an attitude at odds with calling a suicide hotline or going to counselling. “That white American self-reliant, rural firearm owner persona is also going to have a self-reliant attitude towards their mental health problems and end-of-life choices,” Barnhorst said. Her work across many communities has taught her that cultural sensitivity matters, especially in places like Shasta.
The Shasta Health and Human Services Agency has rolled out free lockbox giveaways and an awareness campaign, including ads on city buses in Redding urging people to safely store firearms and medication. The “You Matter Shasta” initiative has organised free gun safe and lock giveaways at gun ranges and, separately, among the county’s Spanish- and Mien-speaking communities. But progress is slow. According to staff, only about 200 safes have been distributed. Meanwhile, the county approved roughly 4,688 active concealed carry gun permits over the past two years. Lindsay Heuer, an education specialist with the county’s public health team, said the discrepancy reflects “broader structural challenges, not a lack of need or effort. Access can be uneven, especially in a rural county like ours, where not everyone attends community events or knows where to get a safety device.” She added that the department has been hampered by state cuts to funding and staffing.
Another part of the puzzle, Heuer said, is that people often have misguided understandings of safety — such as the belief that being able to reach a firearm quickly to protect a family against an intruder is more important than storing it in a lockbox. (Studies have suggested that Californians who live in homes with a firearm are significantly more likely to be victims of homicide in their own homes.) Heuer said that when people raise this scenario, she suggests a compromise: lock up a firearm or its ammunition if someone in the household is experiencing acute depression. “Safe storage conversations are most effective when they come from trusted sources and are framed around safety and care,” she said, “not judgment or regulation.”
The importance of accessibility — or the lack of it — is underscored by research from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, which found that many suicide survivors said they spent less than 20 minutes deliberating before trying to take their own lives. That short timeline is why Shasta’s public health team has focused on teaching safe storage and increasing access to safety equipment. Marcia Ramstrom, a local suicide crisis counsellor who supports surviving family members in what she calls “suicide postvention”, said: “Most of the time when you get to that place when you’re convinced suicide is the answer, you’ve got tunnel vision.” Ramstrom took up this work after her older brother, struggling with untreated bipolar disorder, called 911 in 2013 and pleaded with the dispatcher to send police to kill him. When officers arrived, he drew a loaded firearm; they responded with gunfire. Raised Catholic, he believed suicide was a sin, so he found a way to take his life without pulling the trigger himself.
Political will and systemic gaps
Matt Plummer, who began his term as a county supervisor last year, quickly became known for his data-driven approach to voting on agenda items. After his election, he studied the metrics that made Shasta an outlier in the state. What stood out most was the suicide rate. “I would like to see us bring our suicide rate into line with the state average,” he said. He has committed to “cutting the suicide rate in half” and devised a three-phase vision: connecting with high-risk patients, continuing safety measures such as distributing gunlocks and safes, and then tackling bigger structural factors, including social isolation.
Some of this work has begun through Shasta County’s newly formed suicide fatality review team, made up of law enforcement, public health officials, coroners and medical examiners who perform postmortem examinations of suicides — with the family’s permission. Other California counties, including nearby Glenn, have set up similar teams to understand gaps in suicide prevention policies and resources. “Suicide is the last sign that things upstream are probably not working quite right,” Plummer said. “I see it as this blaring, flashing, red light that things are broken.” In April, he and the county’s public health director were selected to participate in an initiative with the National Association of Counties to strategise on preventing suicide in Shasta.
Kelly Rocha agrees that things are broken. She is glad the county is discussing different types of interventions, including trying to break through cultural barriers that stop residents from seeking mental health services. But she is not sure any of them could have saved her father. As a nurse, she asks all her patients if they have felt suicidal. “Easily, somebody can deny it and say no,” she said. Her father, she believes, was one of those people — someone who would never have asked for help or admitted his feelings of despair. Tackling this mental health stigma, she says, is the first step. “Somebody like my dad, he didn’t talk about feelings or emotions. He had all these guy friends, and the last thing I would ever imagine he would do is admit he was depressed, or seek help.”
