Firearms and Suicide Risk…
I had one great-grandfather and one great-great-grandfather commit suicide-by-firearm–that’s a hazard of 2 out of 15 Y-chromosome near-ancestors. I know of two suicides and two tragic deadly accidents involving firearms among immediate families of other relatives and close friends. I know of nobody who was ever really glad that they had a gun in the house.
Social science says: Keep your guns at the shooting range people! For your sake, your relatives’ sake, and the sake of those they come in contact with!
Justin Briggs and Alex Tabarrok: Gun ownership causes higher suicide rates:
In the year since Adam Lanza used a Bushmaster rifle to gun down 20 children in Newtown, Conn., the discourse on gun control has focused on mass shootings and homicides. That’s not surprising: Terrible events dominate the cable news cycle, and murders get reported every day in our nation’s newspapers. But if we want to talk about the effects of guns, we should remember this: In a typical year, suicides outnumber homicides by 3 to 1 and a majority of suicides are by firearm. Suicides come in ones and twos, here and there; they rarely make the national news, and when they are reported at all they are veiled in euphemism (“He died suddenly”). Suicides go so underreported that Slate’s Gun Deaths Project, which collects data from news articles and other online sources, categorizes only roughly one-tenth of the reported deaths as suicides….
Places with lots of guns may have high homicide rates, but is this because guns cause homicide or because homicides cause people to buy guns? Or could a third factor—say, a general lack of social trust or high violence in a region—be causing both homicides and gun possession? The relationship between suicides and guns is much easier to tackle because it’s unlikely that an increase in the number of suicides in a community would cause an increase in local gun ownership….
We studied the relationship between guns and suicide in the U.S. from 2000 to 2009. Using five measures of gun ownership and controlling for other factors associated with suicide, such as mental illness, we consistently found that each 1 percentage-point increase in household gun ownership rates leads to between 0.5 and 0.9 percent more suicides. Or, to put it the other way, a percentage-point decrease in household gun ownership leads to between 0.5 and 0.9 percent fewer suicides. Are the people not killing themselves with guns simply committing suicide by other means? Some are—but not all…. Contrary to the “folk wisdom” that people who want to commit suicide will always find a way to get the job done, suicides are not inevitable. Suicides are often impulsive decisions, and guns require less forethought than other means of suicide—and they’re also deadlier….
Don’t take our critique of bans on government-funded research as a plea for more funding for our research. We would be satisfied if the CDC and other government agencies such as the Bureau of Justice Statistics were simply allowed to collect more and better data on guns, homicide and suicide….
As Andrew Leigh and Christine Neill determined in a paper published in the American Law and Economics Review, these changes resulted in a reduction of the country’s firearm stock by 20 percent, or more than 650,000 firearms, and evidence suggests that it nearly halved the share of Australian households with one or more firearms. The effect of this reduction was an 80 percent fall in suicides by firearm, concentrated in regions with the biggest drop in firearms. Meanwhile there was little sign of any lasting rise in non-firearm suicides.