Guns and suicide

I wrote recently in this post about the article in the New York Times on "understanding suicide" and the predictable anti-gun bias and narrow and one-sided perspective expressed in that article.

Here's an article in Reason, explaining why buying a gun is not a suicidal act:

Americans often buy guns for self-defense, a purpose that now has Supreme Court validation. But according to advocates of gun control, those purchasers overlook the people who pose the greatest threat: themselves. Anyone who acquires a firearm, we are told, is inviting a bloody death by suicide.

So says Matthew Miller, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. "If you bought a gun today, I could tell you the risk of suicide to you and your family members is going to be two- to tenfold higher over the next 20 years," he told The Washington Post. Since the chance of a gun being used for suicide is so much higher than the chance of it being used to prevent a murder, we would all be better off with fewer firearms around.

It's a rich irony—as though smoke alarms were increasing fire fatalities. But the argument raises two questions: Is it true? And, when it comes to gun control policy, does it matter?

As it turns out, the claims about guns and suicide don't stand up well to scrutiny. A 2004 report by the National Academy of Sciences was doubtful, noting that the alleged association is small and may be illusory.

Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck says there are at least 13 published studies finding no meaningful connection between the rate of firearms and the rate of suicides. The consensus of experts, he says, is that an increase in gun ownership doesn't raise the number of people who kill themselves—only the number who do it with a gun.
...
A few decades ago, various European countries changed the type of natural gas used for home heating and cooking—replacing a toxic form with a harmless variety. That step eliminated one time-tested way of killing oneself. Alas, while the number of gas suicides declined, in most of these countries, the death toll didn't.

The same pattern holds for guns. The National Academy of Sciences report noted that any link between firearms and suicides "is not found in comparisons across countries." The number of guns in a nation tells you nothing about its suicide rate.

Read the Reason article here. In contrast, the New York Times, in its article, interviewed a slew of noted gun prohibitionists, but didn't bother to cite or interview any of the "big picture" sources in the Reason article quoted above. I guess when you're pushing an agenda, contrary information, particularly from credible and respected sources, only gets in your way.

Another article, by John Lott, makes some of the same points (links omitted):

[Washington Post columnist] Vedantam points to a 1991 study in the New England Journal of Medicine that claims that after examining data from 1968 to 1987, “the gun ban correlated with an abrupt 25 percent decline in suicides in the city” and that the “decline was entirely driven by a decline in firearm-related suicide.”

Yes, suicides did indeed decline after the ban.

However, it is unlikely to have much to do with banning guns as non-gun suicides fell even slightly faster than gun suicides (see the graph).

If the gun ban caused the drop in suicides, why would the non-gun suicide rate fall at least as much as the gun suicide rate?

A far more likely explanation is that something else was changing and causing people to not want to commit suicide, no matter what method they might consider.

Yet, the D.C. experience isn’t unique.

The National Academy of Sciences released a 2004 report that comprehensively reviewed academic research studying guns and suicide.

The panel set up under the Clinton administration surveyed the extensive literature from public health, economics and criminology. The Academy concluded that "Some gun control policies may reduce the number of gun suicides, but they have not yet been shown to reduce the overall risk of suicide in any population.”

The association between gun ownership and gun suicide was “modest” and not particularly consistent.

In addition, the panel pointed out that even the studies that claim more guns increase gun suicides are “unclear” on why the relationship exists.

Yet, more importantly, the presence of guns had no impact on total suicides.

That finding is true not only for the United States, but also across countries.

Read Lott's article here. Of course, even if access to guns were shown to increase the suicide rate (which showing, after decades of study, has not materialized), such societal cost considerations would still pale in comparison to the two million plus defensive gun uses on the benefit side. And, obviously, none of these social science studies would (or should) affect the constitutional protections afforded by the Second Amendment, or the inherent human right of self-defense.