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Suicide is definitely linked to gun availability. "A study by the Harvard School of Public Health of all 50 U.S. states reveals a powerful link between rates o

Suicide is definitely linked to gun availability. "A study by the Harvard School of Public Health of all 50 U.S. states reveals a powerful link between rates of firearm ownership and suicides. Based on a survey of American households conducted in 2002, HSPH Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management Matthew Miller, Research Associate Deborah Azrael, and colleagues at the School’s Injury Control Research Center (ICRC), found that in states where guns were prevalent—as in Wyoming, where 63 percent of households reported owning guns—rates of suicide were higher. The inverse was also true: where gun ownership was less common, suicide rates were also lower." https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/guns-and-suicide/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/guns-and-suicide/

wahern 9y ago
Gun ownership in the U.S. is strongly correlated with socio-economic status, locality, etc. Everybody points to the Australian example, where suicides declined after the 1996 gun control legislation. But unemployment in Australia peaked in 1995 and declined precipitously afterward until 2009. Given everything we know about suicide rates in other countries, and about changes in suicide rates domestically (e.g. recent increase as gun ownership goes _down_[1]), it would very odd if gun ownership was a root cause of suicide. That said, in a country with a strong gun culture like the U.S., I would totally expect a generational dip in suicides if we substantially removed access to guns. But then I'd expect it to normalize when suicidal individuals became more comfortable with other methods. Just like with mass shootings, there's a strong imitation effect. Take away the model that people imitate and it might be awhile until there's a regression to the mean. Even so, that's still reasonable justification for limiting access to guns--saving tens of thousands of individuals. I'm not sure I'd agree with such a policy prescription because of the insane gun politics, but it's quite defensible from a public health perspective. [1] Number of guns have increased but they're concentrated in fewer households.
- loeg 9y ago
  https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/ Tl;dr? * Many suicide attempts occur with little planning during a short-term crisis. * Intent isn’t all that determines whether an attempter lives or dies; means also matter. * 90% of attempters who survive do NOT go on to die by suicide later. * Access to firearms is a risk factor for suicide. * Firearms used in youth suicide usually belong to a parent. * Reducing access to lethal means saves lives.
  - wahern 9y ago
    Those are all just rationalizations. They can't reflect anything intrinsic about suicide risk if they can't predict relative suicide rates outside the U.S. Suicide is an epiphenomenon of larger socio-economic issues. Among OECD countries the U.S. comes in the middle of the pack. If guns were a causative factor, then considering how prevalent they are (by a ridiculous factor!) our rates should be much higher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Suicide-deaths-per-100000-trend.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/... http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/03/how-does-americas-suicide-rate-compare-globally/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/03/how-does-americas-suicid... http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/health_glance-2011-en/01/06/g1-06-01.html?itemId=%2Fcontent%2Fchapter%2Fhealth_glance-2011-9-en&_csp_=dc7450c10468a7a49a6262726a53ecee http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/health_glance-2011-en/01/... Any correlation between guns and suicide in the U.S. is easily understood in terms of modeling--guns are how Americans kill themselves. Take away the guns and, yes, there'll be a dip in suicide rates, until Americans learn how people kill themselves elsewhere around the world. Heck, they're already learning that with opioids. Let's go back to what I said about Australia. I claimed that the change in Australian suicide rates is better understood in terms of the unemployment rate. Now let's test that hypothesis. [... google google google ... ] Here we go: Suicide has reached a 10-year high in Australia as 3027 people killed themselves last year, the largest cause of death among 15 to 44-year-olds. Last year, 12.6 people in every 100,000 killed themselves compared to 12 the year before, 11.4 in 2012 and a low of 10.4 in 2006. -- http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/suicide-rate-in-australia-reaches-10year-high/news-story/cb5d8384aadb571778775bda236f3c35 What was the rate in 1995, the year before the gun control law? 13.0. (https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/2011-2012/Suicide#_Toc299625631 https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...) So suicides were at their lowest the very same year that unemployment was at its lowest (2006)? Check! And they rose as unemployment rose? Check! To the point where they're back at the pre-law level? Check! I won't deny that there's some nuance here that we can tease out, but if you read the actual papers that link guns to suicide, they do a much worse job at nuance. In fact, not a single one of the papers I've read even considered the unemployment rate. Which is patently bad science. Correlation is not causation. All the gun suicide papers do is point out specious correlations. But you don't need a degree in statistics to know this. And you don't need a science degree to be able to see the gargantuan holes in these arguments--that the correlations have simpler explanations. I'm not denying that gun control could appreciably effect suicide rates. Imitation and modeling have huge effects--much more well-established than the supposed gun effect. So huge that even news media abstain from reporting suicides, especially methods of suicide. Saving thousands of lives with gun control, even if it's an ephemeral gain, is an absolute benefit that's worth debating about. But let's just be honest about this stuff.
marcoperaza 9y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide... Lots of Europe has a higher suicide rate than the US. Within the US, as the other response said, gun ownership is confounded by all sorts of other factors.
- aplummer 9y ago
  "Lots" is strong, given that the only western European countries higher were Finland and Sweden I could see, which is known to be caused by the long and dark winters.

wahern 9y ago

Gun ownership in the U.S. is strongly correlated with socio-economic status, locality, etc. Everybody points to the Australian example, where suicides declined after the 1996 gun control legislation. But unemployment in Australia peaked in 1995 and declined precipitously afterward until 2009. Given everything we know about suicide rates in other countries, and about changes in suicide rates domestically (e.g. recent increase as gun ownership goes _down_[1]), it would very odd if gun ownership was a root cause of suicide. That said, in a country with a strong gun culture like the U.S., I would totally expect a generational dip in suicides if we substantially removed access to guns. But then I'd expect it to normalize when suicidal individuals became more comfortable with other methods. Just like with mass shootings, there's a strong imitation effect. Take away the model that people imitate and it might be awhile until there's a regression to the mean. Even so, that's still reasonable justification for limiting access to guns--saving tens of thousands of individuals. I'm not sure I'd agree with such a policy prescription because of the insane gun politics, but it's quite defensible from a public health perspective. [1] Number of guns have increased but they're concentrated in fewer households.

loeg 9y ago
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/ Tl;dr? * Many suicide attempts occur with little planning during a short-term crisis. * Intent isn’t all that determines whether an attempter lives or dies; means also matter. * 90% of attempters who survive do NOT go on to die by suicide later. * Access to firearms is a risk factor for suicide. * Firearms used in youth suicide usually belong to a parent. * Reducing access to lethal means saves lives.
- wahern 9y ago
  Those are all just rationalizations. They can't reflect anything intrinsic about suicide risk if they can't predict relative suicide rates outside the U.S. Suicide is an epiphenomenon of larger socio-economic issues. Among OECD countries the U.S. comes in the middle of the pack. If guns were a causative factor, then considering how prevalent they are (by a ridiculous factor!) our rates should be much higher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Suicide-deaths-per-100000-trend.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/... http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/03/how-does-americas-suicide-rate-compare-globally/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/03/how-does-americas-suicid... http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/health_glance-2011-en/01/06/g1-06-01.html?itemId=%2Fcontent%2Fchapter%2Fhealth_glance-2011-9-en&_csp_=dc7450c10468a7a49a6262726a53ecee http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/health_glance-2011-en/01/... Any correlation between guns and suicide in the U.S. is easily understood in terms of modeling--guns are how Americans kill themselves. Take away the guns and, yes, there'll be a dip in suicide rates, until Americans learn how people kill themselves elsewhere around the world. Heck, they're already learning that with opioids. Let's go back to what I said about Australia. I claimed that the change in Australian suicide rates is better understood in terms of the unemployment rate. Now let's test that hypothesis. [... google google google ... ] Here we go: Suicide has reached a 10-year high in Australia as 3027 people killed themselves last year, the largest cause of death among 15 to 44-year-olds. Last year, 12.6 people in every 100,000 killed themselves compared to 12 the year before, 11.4 in 2012 and a low of 10.4 in 2006. -- http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/suicide-rate-in-australia-reaches-10year-high/news-story/cb5d8384aadb571778775bda236f3c35 What was the rate in 1995, the year before the gun control law? 13.0. (https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/2011-2012/Suicide#_Toc299625631 https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...) So suicides were at their lowest the very same year that unemployment was at its lowest (2006)? Check! And they rose as unemployment rose? Check! To the point where they're back at the pre-law level? Check! I won't deny that there's some nuance here that we can tease out, but if you read the actual papers that link guns to suicide, they do a much worse job at nuance. In fact, not a single one of the papers I've read even considered the unemployment rate. Which is patently bad science. Correlation is not causation. All the gun suicide papers do is point out specious correlations. But you don't need a degree in statistics to know this. And you don't need a science degree to be able to see the gargantuan holes in these arguments--that the correlations have simpler explanations. I'm not denying that gun control could appreciably effect suicide rates. Imitation and modeling have huge effects--much more well-established than the supposed gun effect. So huge that even news media abstain from reporting suicides, especially methods of suicide. Saving thousands of lives with gun control, even if it's an ephemeral gain, is an absolute benefit that's worth debating about. But let's just be honest about this stuff.

marcoperaza 9y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide... Lots of Europe has a higher suicide rate than the US. Within the US, as the other response said, gun ownership is confounded by all sorts of other factors.

aplummer 9y ago
"Lots" is strong, given that the only western European countries higher were Finland and Sweden I could see, which is known to be caused by the long and dark winters.