Shasta County, a rural region about 200 miles north of San Francisco, has one of California’s highest rates of both gun ownership and suicide, according to county health data and interviews with officials, clinicians, and bereaved families.
In 2022, the county’s suicide rate reached an all-time high of 33.3 per 100,000 — triple California’s average, according to county data. Guns were the most common method. In 2024, 43 suicides were recorded, an increase of about a quarter from the previous year. Three-quarters of those who died by suicide in 2024 were men, and nearly every one of them used a firearm, according to the county.
The UC Davis BulletPoints Project reported that in 2024, 41% of households along California’s northern coast owned firearms, 35% in and around the upper Sierra mountain range, and 44% in the north San Joaquin valley. By comparison, 22% of households in urban areas including Los Angeles and the Bay Area had firearms that year.
Public health officials said that simply discouraging gun ownership is unlikely to be effective in Shasta, where gun ownership is deeply ingrained in local political and cultural identity. Instead, the county’s health and human services agency has focused on a strategy called “means safety” — creating distance between a person in crisis and lethal means such as a loaded, unlocked firearm.
The You Matter Shasta initiative has organized free gun safe and lock giveaways at gun ranges over the past several years and has coordinated similar events among the county’s Spanish and Mien-speaking communities. Lindsay Heuer, an education specialist with the county’s public health team, said the county has distributed about 200 safes. Meanwhile, the county approved about 4,688 active concealed carry gun permits over the past two years.
“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,” Heuer said. She said the department has been hampered by state cuts to funding and staffing.
Heuer said people often have misguided understandings of safety, such as the belief that being able to reach a firearm quickly to protect against an intruder is more important than storing it in a lockbox. Studies have suggested that Californians who live in homes with a firearm were significantly more likely to be the victims of homicide in their homes, according to the article.
“Safe storage conversations are most effective when they come from trusted sources and are framed around safety and care,” Heuer said, “not judgment or regulation.”
Matt Plummer, who began his term as a county supervisor last year, said he studied the metrics that made Shasta an outlier in the state after his election. What stood out to him most was the suicide rate.
“I would like to see us bring our suicide rate into line with the state average,” Plummer said. He said he is dedicated to “cutting the suicide rate in half.”
Plummer outlined a three-phase vision: connecting with high-risk patients, continuing safety measures such as distributing gun locks and safes, and tackling structural factors including social isolation. In April, he and the county’s public health director were selected to participate in an initiative with the National Association of Counties to strategize on suicide prevention.
Shasta County has formed a suicide fatality review team to establish patterns of behavior among people who have died by suicide, with the family’s permission. Other California counties, including nearby Glenn, have set up similar teams.
“[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.”
Kelly Rocha, a nurse whose father Bill Rocha died by gun suicide in 2019, said she asks all her patients if they have felt suicidal. “Easily, somebody can deny it and say no,” she said. She described her father as someone who likely would have never asked for help or admitted his feelings of despair.
“Somebody like my dad, he didn’t talk about feelings or emotions,” Rocha said. “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.”
Rocha said she learned after her father’s death that two of her co-workers also had fathers who died by firearm suicide. She reached out to Marcia Ramstrom, a local suicide crisis counselor who supports surviving family members — work she calls “suicide postvention.”
Ramstrom took up the work after her own family’s tragedy. In 2013, her older brother, who she said was struggling with untreated bipolar disorder, called 911 and pleaded with the dispatcher to send police to kill him. When officers responded, he drew a loaded firearm and police shot him. Ramstrom said her brother, who was raised Catholic, believed suicide was a sin, so he sought a way to take his own life without pulling the trigger himself.
“Most of the time when you get to that place when you’re convinced suicide is the answer, you’ve got tunnel vision,” Ramstrom said.
According to research by the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health cited in the article, many suicide survivors said they spent less than 20 minutes deliberating before trying to take their own lives. This short timeline is why accessibility is key, and why Shasta’s public health team has focused on teaching the importance of safely storing firearms and increasing access to safety equipment.
Amy Barnhorst, the associate director of the Centers for Violence Prevention at UC Davis, said cultural sensitivity matters in places like Shasta. “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,” she said.
Rocha said she is happy the county is discussing different types of interventions, including trying to break through cultural barriers that prevent residents from seeking mental health services. But she said she is not sure any of them could have saved her father.
“I know my kids are gonna have a tendency to become alcoholics,” Rocha said. “From here on out, my goal is to stop that. Suicide should stop with my dad. I think we need to talk about it more.”
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.