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Fraction of Suicides with Guns vs Per Capita Guns in the U.S. 1981 to 2014
During the last 60 years, the number of guns in private hands in the United States has risen sharply. During the last 22 years, the number of murders and non-negligent homicides have fallen sharply. It has become clear that more guns do not equal more crime. In response, opponents of an armed population have shifted their focus and changed the terminology.
Instead of gun control, they call restrictive policies “gun safety”.
Instead of focusing on violent crime, they have created the term “gun violence”. Most people consider gun violence to be “gun crime”. The opponents of gun ownership use the term to include suicides and accidents as well as murder. They lump them all together as “gun deaths”.
The theory is that more guns equal more deaths. As fatal gun accidents have fallen to all time lows, the number of “gun deaths” are mostly suicides. The claim has become “more guns equal more suicides”.
The claim ignores the fact that other cultures with few guns have higher suicide rates than the United States. Substitute methods are readily available.
If more guns equals more suicides, you would expect the percentage of suicides committed with guns to increase as the per capita number of guns in the country increased. Looking at the percentage of suicides with guns eliminates the various economic ups and downs and extraneous factors that cause all suicides to rise and fall.
Comparing the fraction of gun suicides to the per capita number of guns in the country eliminates many of the problems with surveys and estimates of gun numbers in various states, cities and regions, where data about gun ownership is unreliable.
We have good data from the ATF about increases in private gun numbers. Slight variations in baseline gun numbers are not important. The slope of the per capita graph will remain the same. Baseline numbers would only shift the graph up or down a small amount.
It is clear that the fraction of suicides with firearms has followed the general trend of homicides. The fraction of suicides with firearms has decreased over the 35 year period that the CDC has records. It started at .58 of suicides in 1981, rose to highs of .61 from 1990 to 1997 (also the high point of homicides), then started a long decline ending at .49, the record low, in 2014.
During the same period per capita gun numbers increased from .754 in 1981 to 1.176 in 2014. While the fraction of suicides committed with guns fell 16 percent, the per capita number of guns in the country rose 56 percent.
It is difficult to explain this figure if more guns equal more suicides, especially over 35 years and several economic cycles.
The rates of suicide used are those from the Center for Disease Control, which they have corrected to account for age. The age correction does not make a large difference. It removes the variation associated with changing percentages of various age groups over the decades examined.
©2016 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.
Link to Gun Watch
Source: http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2016/07/fraction-of-suicides-with-guns-vs-per.html
