Maybe they should use this test before gun purchases... I don't think someone suicidal should purchase a gun...hell I don't care if they kill themselves, but lately a lot of suicides were mass suicides...we don't need more of that shit.
> Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Tip: If you own a gun and are feeling suicidal, give it to a trusted person for safekeeping.
"A study by the Harvard School of Public Health of all 50 U.S. states reveals a powerful link between rates of firearm ownership and suicides. Based on a survey of American households conducted in 2002, HSPH Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management Matthew Miller, Research Associate Deborah Azrael, and colleagues at the School’s Injury Control Research Center (ICRC), found that in states where guns were prevalent—as in Wyoming, where 63 percent of households reported owning guns—rates of suicide were higher. The inverse was also true: where gun ownership was less common, suicide rates were also lower."
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/guns-and-suicide/
Everybody points to the Australian example, where suicides declined after the 1996 gun control legislation. But unemployment in Australia peaked in 1995 and declined precipitously afterward until 2009.
Given everything we know about suicide rates in other countries, and about changes in suicide rates domestically (e.g. recent increase as gun ownership goes _down_[1]), it would very odd if gun ownership was a root cause of suicide.
That said, in a country with a strong gun culture like the U.S., I would totally expect a generational dip in suicides if we substantially removed access to guns. But then I'd expect it to normalize when suicidal individuals became more comfortable with other methods. Just like with mass shootings, there's a strong imitation effect. Take away the model that people imitate and it might be awhile until there's a regression to the mean.
Even so, that's still reasonable justification for limiting access to guns--saving tens of thousands of individuals. I'm not sure I'd agree with such a policy prescription because of the insane gun politics, but it's quite defensible from a public health perspective.
[1] Number of guns have increased but they're concentrated in fewer households.
Tl;dr?
* Many suicide attempts occur with little planning during a short-term crisis.
* Intent isn’t all that determines whether an attempter lives or dies; means also matter.
* 90% of attempters who survive do NOT go on to die by suicide later.
* Access to firearms is a risk factor for suicide.
* Firearms used in youth suicide usually belong to a parent.
* Reducing access to lethal means saves lives.
Suicide is an epiphenomenon of larger socio-economic issues. Among OECD countries the U.S. comes in the middle of the pack. If guns were a causative factor, then considering how prevalent they are (by a ridiculous factor!) our rates should be much higher:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/... http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/03/how-does-americas-suicid... http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/health_glance-2011-en/01/...
Any correlation between guns and suicide in the U.S. is easily understood in terms of modeling--guns are how Americans kill themselves. Take away the guns and, yes, there'll be a dip in suicide rates, until Americans learn how people kill themselves elsewhere around the world. Heck, they're already learning that with opioids.
Let's go back to what I said about Australia. I claimed that the change in Australian suicide rates is better understood in terms of the unemployment rate. Now let's test that hypothesis. [... google google google ... ] Here we go:
Suicide has reached a 10-year high in Australia as 3027
people killed themselves last year, the largest cause of
death among 15 to 44-year-olds.
Last year, 12.6 people in every 100,000 killed themselves
compared to 12 the year before, 11.4 in 2012 and a low of
10.4 in 2006.
-- http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/suicide-rate-in-australia-reaches-10year-high/news-story/cb5d8384aadb571778775bda236f3c35
So suicides were at their lowest the very same year that unemployment was at its lowest (2006)? Check! And they rose as unemployment rose? Check! To the point where they're back at the pre-law level? Check!
I won't deny that there's some nuance here that we can tease out, but if you read the actual papers that link guns to suicide, they do a much worse job at nuance. In fact, not a single one of the papers I've read even considered the unemployment rate. Which is patently bad science.
Correlation is not causation. All the gun suicide papers do is point out specious correlations. But you don't need a degree in statistics to know this. And you don't need a science degree to be able to see the gargantuan holes in these arguments--that the correlations have simpler explanations.
I'm not denying that gun control could appreciably effect suicide rates. Imitation and modeling have huge effects--much more well-established than the supposed gun effect. So huge that even news media abstain from reporting suicides, especially methods of suicide. Saving thousands of lives with gun control, even if it's an ephemeral gain, is an absolute benefit that's worth debating about. But let's just be honest about this stuff.
It does seem like you agree in your last paragraph though though... gun control would lower suicide rates. People would try other methods which have higher failure rates, people's lives would be saved. Not all of them, but an appreciable amount.
Lots of Europe has a higher suicide rate than the US. Within the US, as the other response said, gun ownership is confounded by all sorts of other factors.
(It's also not clear that even if they have suicidal ideation that they're not entitled to gun rights, but I don't feel like having that debate today.)
I don't know about other states but it's likely any that require background checks for private transfers ("closing the gunshow loophole") would make this behavior illegal.