By John Ostapkovich

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - An attempted suicide at a Philadelphia shooting range this week is the latest in a sporadic series of such sad events.

While Dr. Pietro Miazzo, a forensic psychiatrist at Temple University Hospital, sees no particular uptick in gun range suicides, he has heard of them before.

“A gun range offers an opportunity to obtain a gun, the opportunity of handling a gun without anyone becoming alarmed necessarily, and particularly after the first even there’s an element of copy-cat in the following events.”

There were two such shootings at the same suburban gun range within a year. I asked Dr. Miazzo is there’s any way the range employees could know that a person to whom they’ve just handed a gun and ammo is going to use it against him or herself.

“Probably not.”

Dr. Miazzo says, clinically, one of the main indicators of suicide is that patients talk about it as an option.