Photo by Eduardo Vázquez’s via Unsplash.com.
Recent CDC data has revealed that roughly half of suicides nationwide are by firearms. Forty percent of respondents from a Pew Research Center June 2021 survey said they lived in a household that had guns; 30% said they owned a gun.
During a pandemic where a record number of Americans reported heightened suicidal ideation and other severe mental stress, those data are significant, at least in part, because gun sales have also surged during the past couple of years.
A glance at research
Gun ownership heightens risks of suicide by firearm, a series of studies over the years have concluded. Among the largest and most recent of them is a Stanford University study published in June 2020 in the New England Journal of Medicine. It concluded that men who owned guns were eight times more likely to die than men who didn’t of a self-inflicted gunshot and that the rate of suicide by firearm among women who owned hand guns was 35 times the rate of women who didn’t. Tracking risks from day one of a gun purchase, the analysis examined 26 million Californians across 12 years ending in 2016.
A commentary by a Boston emergency room physician published in the JAMA Network Open cited a 59% increase in firearm suicides by teens between 2010 and 2019, outpacing a 29% spike in other forms of suicide during that period. Teen males used a firearm 51% of the time and teen females 25% of the time.
