Shasta County, a rugged and rural expanse in northern California, has the state’s highest suicide rate and the highest rate of gun ownership – a grim correlation that public health officials are now trying to break without alienating the very communities they seek to help.
A father, a hunter, a statistic
Bill Rocha was, by all accounts, a man who embodied the region. He loved to hunt and fish, spent the long summer months on the lake in his boat, and earned a living as a contractor, working with his hands every day. Like many men in Shasta County, he owned several hunting rifles, some locked in a safe, and another firearm he kept unlocked in his car. His daughter, Kelly Rocha, described him as extremely sociable. But privately, things were starting to fray. She did not know the extent of what her father was struggling with until a night in 2019, when she finally picked up a call after midnight. Her mother told her that Bill had gone out to his truck and killed himself.
Looking back, Kelly said the signs were there: anxiety, depression and alcoholism run in the family; her father was the third man in the Rocha line to die by suicide. And he was a gun owner. His death is emblematic of a crisis that has gripped the northern part of California. In Shasta County in 2024, three-quarters of the people who died by suicide were men, and nearly every one of them used a firearm. “I know my kids are gonna have a tendency to become alcoholics,” Kelly said. “Suicide should stop with my dad.”
The numbers behind the tragedy
The statistics paint a stark picture. According to the UC Davis BulletPoints Project, household gun ownership in 2024 stood at 44% in the north San Joaquin valley, 41% along the northern coast, and 35% in the upper Sierra mountain range – compared with just 22% in urban areas such as Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Shasta County itself has the highest rates of both suicide and gun ownership in the state.
For the period 2020 to 2022, Shasta’s age-adjusted suicide rate was 26.3 per 100,000 people, more than double California’s average of 10.5 per 100,000. In 2022, the county hit an all-time high of 33.3 per 100,000 – triple the state average. Guns were the most common method. While that number has since dropped, the rate remains significantly higher than the statewide average. In 2024, the 43 suicides recorded represented an increase of about a quarter from the previous year. Provisional data for 2025 suggests the trend has not reversed.
Men are disproportionately affected: between 2021 and 2023, 86% of suicide deaths in Shasta County were men – 127 compared with 20 women. Historically, men die by suicide at three to four times the rate of women. The age group most at risk is those 70 and older. Between 2017 and 2022, there were 62 veteran suicides in the county.
The region also faces significant socioeconomic pressures. Shasta County’s poverty rate stands at 13.3% (2020–2024), above the national average of 12.5%, with some 23,700 residents living below the poverty line. While the overall poverty rate has decreased slightly since 2015–2019, the rate for people over 65 has increased. Rural California, including Shasta, suffers from severe shortages of mental health professionals: limited availability of behavioural health providers, high vacancy rates, and long travel distances. Many rural counties lack psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners and psychologists.
‘Means safety’: a cultural compromise
Given the deep cultural and political attachment to firearms in Shasta County, public health officials have concluded that simply discouraging gun ownership would be ineffective and could deter people from seeking help. Instead, the Shasta County Health and Human Services Agency has embraced a strategy called “means safety” – the practice of placing distance and time between a person in crisis and lethal methods such as unlocked guns or large quantities of medication.
The centrepiece of this approach is the free distribution of lockboxes, safes and gun cables. The county’s suicide prevention initiative, You Matter Shasta, has organised giveaways at gun ranges and also coordinated events for Spanish- and Mien-speaking communities. Awareness campaigns include adverts on city buses in Redding, encouraging residents to store firearms and medication safely as a means of preventing suicide.
“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,” said Amy Barnhorst, associate director of the Centers for Violence Prevention at the University of California, Davis. A psychiatrist and researcher, Barnhorst has treated and studied people affected by gun violence across the state. Her work has taught her that cultural sensitivity matters, especially in places like Shasta. She noted that clinicians often feel unprepared to discuss firearms, even though patients view them as trusted sources of information. Her BulletPoints Project at UC Davis develops curricula for healthcare providers on firearm injury prevention, using a risk-based, non-judgmental approach.
The logic behind means safety is backed by evidence. Research from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health found that many suicide survivors said they spent less than 20 minutes deliberating before trying to end their own lives. That short window makes accessibility critical. “Most of the time when you get to that place when you’re convinced suicide is the answer, you’ve got tunnel vision,” said Marcia Ramstrom, a local suicide crisis counsellor whose own brother died in a police shooting after he called 911 and pleaded for officers to kill him – a way of taking his own life without pulling the trigger, because he believed suicide was a sin. Ramstrom now provides “suicide postvention” support to bereaved families, and her perspective is that understanding the tunnel vision of a suicidal crisis is essential for prevention.
Lindsay Heuer, an education specialist with the county’s public health team, said the county has distributed only about 200 safes over the past few years. In contrast, the county approved roughly 4,688 active concealed carry gun permits in the same period. Heuer acknowledged that 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.” The department has also been hampered by state cuts to funding and staffing.
Another obstacle is a common misconception about safety. Many residents believe that being able to reach a firearm quickly to protect their family against an intruder is more important than storing it in a lockbox. (Studies cited by the county indicate that Californians who live in homes with a firearm are significantly more likely to be the victims of homicide in their own homes.) Heuer said she suggests a compromise: lock up the firearm or ammunition when 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.”
Bridging the gap: new initiatives and lingering doubts
Matt Plummer, who became a county supervisor last year, was struck by Shasta’s suicide rate after being elected. He described it as “this blaring, flashing, red light that things are broken.” His three-phase vision involves connecting with high-risk patients, continuing safety measures like distributing gunlocks and safes, and addressing structural factors such as social isolation. Some of this work has begun through the county’s newly formed Suicide Fatality Review Team, which includes law enforcement, public health officials, coroners and medical examiners who perform postmortem examinations of suicides with the family’s permission, to identify gaps in prevention. In April, Plummer and the county’s public health director were chosen to participate in an initiative with the National Association of Counties to strategise on suicide prevention.
In addition to means safety, the You Matter Shasta programme promotes evidence-based training such as Question, Persuade, Refer (QPR), which teaches people to recognise suicide warning signs and how to intervene. Nearly 3,500 people in Shasta County have been trained since 2009. Another programme, “More Than Sad”, aims to teach teens, parents and educators to spot depression and refer individuals for help. The county’s Suicide Prevention Strategic Plan for 2024–2028 emphasises a public health approach targeting population, community and individual levels, aligning with California’s statewide plan.
Extreme Risk Protection Orders, known in California as Gun Violence Restraining Orders, are another tool – allowing family members and law enforcement to petition for the temporary removal of firearms from someone deemed an immediate danger to themselves or others. Research suggests they can prevent suicides, but awareness and use of the orders remain uneven.
Yet Kelly Rocha, speaking from experience, is not convinced any of these measures 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. Bill Rocha, she believes, would never have asked for help or admitted his feelings of despair. “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.” Tackling that mental health stigma, she said, is the first step – one that remains stubbornly difficult in a community where self-reliance is prized and vulnerability is seen as weakness.