September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month and brings with it some unwanted news about the link between guns and suicide. The first city-level analysis of firearm deaths from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that gun suicide rates increased by 11% between 2014 and 2020.
Gun homicide rates also increased by 18% during this period. The 2022 mass shootings rightfully sparked outrage, but more than half of gun deaths in the United States are suicides.
Suicide itself is a larger commonly understood cause of premature death. In 2020, it was the second leading cause of death for Americans ages 10-14 and 25-34 (after unintentional accidents), according to the CDC. Between the ages of 15 and 24 he was third (just behind Murder) and between the ages of 35 and 44 he was fourth.
Guns add a deadly dimension to this public health problem.Research published in Annals of internal medicine A review of millions of records from hospitals and emergency departments found that less than 9% of all suicide attempts were fatal, while nearly 90% involving firearms resulted in death.
The city-level findings are outlined in the report “Gun Suicide in Cities,” a joint study between the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety and New York University Langone Health. Gun mortality data is incorporated into Langone Health’s City Health Dashboard, which includes more than 40 measures of health and health equity.
Mark Gorewicz, Dean of Population Health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and lead designer of the dashboard, said: “One of the lessons that can be learned from this analysis, he said, is that it’s important to focus on reducing access to guns for people who may be considering suicide.”
Fewer Policies, More Deaths
According to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), the death rate from suicide increased by 12% between 2010 and 2020, surpassing that from car crashes.
Suicide rates among African Americans have increased from 5.4 to 7.7 per 100,000 people over the past decade, while white Americans are more than twice as likely as blacks. The biggest increase in this period was for young people aged 12-17, at 62%.
Heather Saunders, a postdoctoral health services researcher at KFF, published her findings in July of this year on the prevalence of gun suicides in these trends. This month is the month the three-digit national suicide and crisis dial code 988 went into effect.
Sanders researched suicide rates at the state level and found considerable variation from state to state. “When we analyzed by type of suicide and included firearm suicides, we noticed that firearm suicide rates appeared to create variability,” he said.
She then consulted a state firearms law database and grouped states according to the number of gun law provisions and assigned them to “low,” “medium,” and “high” categories. (Categories are based only on the number of laws, not the type of law.)
States with the fewest gun laws had the highest gun suicide rates, twice as high as states in the High category. If all states had gun suicide rates found in states with the most gun laws, Sanders said, all Suicide-related deaths may be avoided.
“My research was not designed to show causality,” Sanders says. “You’re just seeing two things happening at the same time.”
Law may not be the only factor that influences how easy or difficult it is for a suicidal person to access a firearm. However, city-level analyzes by NYU and Everytown found a similar relationship between policy and mortality.
At the state level, higher populations don’t necessarily correlate with higher gun suicides.
understand the determinants
Megan J. O’Toole, Deputy Director of Research, Everytown for Gun Safety, said:
An analysis of CDC data from more than 750 cities with populations of 50,000 or more found that 4 in 10 suicide deaths are due to firearms, resulting in 7,000 deaths annually.
Cities in states with the strongest laws to prevent gun violence have half as many gun suicides as cities in states with the weakest laws, which is consistent with the KFF findings. “Strength” was determined based on a state gun law ranking system developed by Everytown.
Gun store prevalence was even more strongly associated with gun suicide deaths, with the highest range (10 or more stores per 100,000 inhabitants) and the lowest range (<3 stores per 100,000 inhabitants). It was four times as many.
Gun suicide rates were higher in cities lacking walkable areas and parks, twice as high as in cities with the most green spaces.
Park access and walkability is one of the metrics included in the City Health Dashboard. By including firearms data in dashboards, city planners and health officials can examine the relationship between gun violence numbers and other social, health and environmental indicators. These can be viewed at the city level or the census block level.
One starting point might be life expectancy, Gourevitch says. “There are many factors in life expectancy and it can vary greatly from region to region. That starts a conversation about what might be driving it and then other measures You can look to.”
prevention
Strategies for keeping guns away from people contemplating self-harm are well understood and not all require legislative action. As of 2021, only 14 states had secure storage or gun lock requirements. take great responsibility for
Everytown’s Be Smart campaign offers a variety of safe storage training resources that can be used by jurisdictional and local organizations, and whose volunteers provide regular training in the community. Gunshops can contribute to educational efforts and provide third-party storage, O’Toole said.
The Extreme Risk Protection Order, also known as the “red flags” law, creates a legal mechanism, including due process, that allows a person to remove a firearm from someone who threatens to commit violence against themselves (or others). To do. Nineteen states have enacted such laws.
Gourevitch says the majority of people who attempt suicide see a medical professional a month before attempting suicide. Opportunities to screen for symptoms are lost and services should be made available to those in distress.
Barbers, hairdressers, friends and family are also part of the prevention infrastructure, says O’Toole. “We all have a role to play in reducing gun suicides.”
If you know someone contemplating suicide, you can seek help at 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
