““My name is Courtney Love and six years ago, on April 7, my husband Kurt Cobain shot himself to death. Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary emotion. If you’ve ever lived with somebody with depression you know how they suffer, but you should also know that there is help, depression is treatable. It’s one of the greatest tragedies on earth that of the 32,000 gun deaths every year in America, 17,000 are those who kill themselves. Over 1200 kids, three children a day, die from self inflicted gun wounds. Three children will shoot themselves in this country before the sun goes down. In a moment of desperation and chaos life is ended, because a gun was handy and near and probably unregistered.

There are those who say, oh please, have a gun for protection. But I know better. Suicide is five times more likely in a house with a gun than in a house without one. Ask any Mother who finds a child’s body in the bedroom, or who hears a shot in the basement and rushes down to see their daughter lying on the floor, if guns are really good protection. Ask a child like my little girl, Frances, who will never have her father hold her hand as she walks to school, or teach her to play guitar, ask her if it’s good protection. I try to explain to my child that her Father is dead, and that hundreds of other children’s Fathers are dead because we have no way of protecting depressed people from their darkest moment. Because we have nihilistic, barbaric gun laws in this country.

And that’s why I’m here. If we registered guns, if we licensed gun owners, if we checked for criminal records and for mental illness, then we will make it harder for people to buy guns, and then we will save countless lives. I know if Kurt could see his daughter today, he’d be so glad that he was alive. He’d be so glad to be here walking in the Lincoln Memorial or buying her an ice cream. I miss my friend. My daughter misses her Father. Thousands and thousands of children felt that his choice was an option for them. An option made so easy. He was a really great poet and a beautiful songwriter, but he also became a symbol for a tragic death. A tragic muse of death by gun shot wound that he never, ever, ever would have wanted to be.
Here’s how he died: An acquaintance of my husbands with a long criminal record and a record of mental illness, walked into a pawn shop. It took him about five minutes to purchase a shot gun. He handed it to Kurt on April 6 and on April 7 he was found dead. That’s how easy it is. Thank you.”” — Courtney Love, speech at the Million Mom March, 2000