Title: Gun ownership causes higher suicide rates, study shows.
Headings: It’s Simple: Fewer Guns, Fewer Suicides
It’s Simple: Fewer Guns, Fewer Suicides
Two scientists explore a decade of data to find the tie between gun ownership and suicide in America.
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Content: 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. Advertisement
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The national conversation about guns, and about gun control, should include the relationship between guns and suicide. We recently analyzed a decade’s worth of data on guns and suicides in the United States and we found that the relationship is clear: more guns, more suicides. Suicide is neglected compared with the large quantity of research on the relationship between homicides and guns, a relationship which remains controversial because it’s difficult to demonstrate causality. 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. Advertisement
So in a new paper published in the International Review of Law and Economics, we studied the relationship between guns and suicide in the U.S. from 2000 to 2009.