Also I think people, particularly men, seem to think they're pretty immune to mental illness or fits of emotion. That's another belief that lacks a basis. Whether you die because you had a bad month or because a toddler found your gun, or your partner was angry at you, you'll still be dead.
Of course. And maybe we should encourage people to pursue those alternatives if they're sure in their decision, and maybe take some time to contemplate whether it's what they really want before doing something they can't undo.
But we need to do that anyway, because even without a gun, someone may have a rope on hand, or a bottle of pills. We need to address the underlying issue, not nerf the world because we couldn't be bothered to solve it right.
If your house has a gas leak and someone says "don't turn on the light, it's dangerous" then even if they're right, the real solution is to do something about the gas leak, not to sit in darkness and do nothing while your house is full of gas. And once the gas is out of your house there is no reason not to turn on the light.
First of all, here's the US CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/suicideTechnicalP...
Page 12 says "Reduce access to lethal means among persons at risk of suicide"
Here's the World Health Organisation: https://www.who.int/mental_health/mhgap/evidence/suicide/q7/...
> At the population level, restricting access to means of self-harm (such as pesticides, firearms, high places) is recommended.
> Strength of recommendation: STRONG
> Quality of the evidence: MODERATE
> Collaboration between health and other relevant sectors should be established and the community should be involved actively to find locally feasible ways to implement interventions at the population level to reduce access to means of suicide to decrease deaths from suicide, suicide attempts and acts of self-harm.
> Strength of recommendation: STRONG
> Quality of the evidence: MODERATE
If you have tens of thousands of people dying each year from one method of suicide you need to reduce access to that method while you're putting in place other stuff to reduce suicidality in the population.
The reducing access to means and methods is equivalent in your metaphor to "as you're leaving this gas filled house do not strike any matches".
In your analogy "doing something about the gas leak" (fixing suicidality across a population) is something that takes years of concerted effort across national and local government agencies, see the linked CDC report above for examples.
By not reducing access to means and methods you're saying you're content for people to die a painful death in gas explosions because you think the gas leaks should be fixed quicker, even though everyone who knows anything about gas leaks is telling that's not how it works.
Yes of course. People on psychiatric hold shouldn't have access to firearms any more than they should have access to cutlery or shoelaces.
> The reducing access to means and methods is equivalent in your metaphor to "as you're leaving this gas filled house do not strike any matches".
Leaving the house is equivalent to a psychiatric hold.
> If you have tens of thousands of people dying each year from one method of suicide you need to reduce access to that method while you're putting in place other stuff to reduce suicidality in the population.
We already do this for anyone known to be at immediate risk, the problem is in accurately identifying who that is.
There is also a real risk that if you do things like condition voluntary outpatient psychiatric treatment on losing access to firearms, that would deter people who own firearms from seeking treatment. Then the choice isn't between treatment and firearms or treatment and no firearms, it's between firearms and treatment or firearms and no treatment.
> In your analogy "doing something about the gas leak" (fixing suicidality across a population) is something that takes years of concerted effort across national and local government agencies, see the linked CDC report above for examples.
Which is, nonetheless, still the only real solution.
What are you suggesting that we do? Declare a state of emergency and confiscate all firearms, but then give them back in a few years once we better address the root causes of suicide? Considering that firearms are used in about half of US suicide deaths and some non-zero number those would only switch to another method, that seems rather extreme for a temporary solution that would solve less than half of the problem, even if it wasn't politically infeasible.
And spending time fighting over that instead of starting to address the root causes right now means that the same number of people die in the short term (as we do nothing but argue) and more die in the long term because it's that much longer before a real solution that addresses the problem independent of method is actually implemented.
We know that there is a large contingent of people who oppose restricting firearms, but who is it in opposition to getting underway with this "concerted effort across national and local government agencies" right away?
The thing about statistics is that they have causes. More people having guns causes more criminals to be shot (or, better yet, deterred), but also more accidents. But those are two different things, one good and one bad, so why don't we work to reduce the bad and keep the good instead of losing both?
We know that much of the bad is caused by poor safety training and by teenagers, so why not add firearms safety training to the school curriculum? How many accidental deaths would be prevented by a semester of "always assume it's loaded and don't point the barrel at anything you wouldn't want to shoot"?
We know that gun safes and range practice reduce accidents, so why not institute some tax incentives? These things may cost less than requiring additional law enforcement and much less than accidental shootings.
And soon you have a net positive instead of a net negative. (Though your original claim did fail to account for the deterrent effect on crime. Which is hard to measure since it's area-wide rather than per-household given that criminals know local culture but not which individual households are armed, but just measuring the households with firearms against those without fails to account for it at all.)
Actually, people tend to more often die of homicide if they own a gun.
Uh, ... wow. "Luckily?"
> you can significantly reduce deaths and injuries by removing guns - which people often have because they think having a gun will reduce those.
There may be better ways to reduce these than trying to remove the guns, though-- ways that mitigate and reduce harm and that don't impact personal liberties or the beneficial aspects of firearms.
That is what one would say if they were grateful for the deaths, isn't it? Isn't it just a bonus that it happens to The Other?
Lets reduce gun deaths. They are tragic and often unnecessary.
Also, fear of The Other, seems to be what drives some of the people in this thread to defend gun ownership. One responder here justified gun ownership by saying other people were "animals" that given the chance would exact violence upon them.
And we can do that by addressing the motivations behind them through social programs.
> Also, fear of The Other,
Technically, what was demonstrated in that comment was closer to hatred than just fear. There's more than enough gun nuts out there who wish that gun owners would shoot themselves.
Lets do those, and gun control.
> Technically, what was demonstrated in that comment was closer to hatred than just fear.
I think guns are neat, and if I move back out to the country I'll probably own one.
> There's more than enough gun nuts out there who wish that gun owners would shoot themselves.
Not me, though.
99.9% of people you might meet are decent folks.
But there's meth around, etc. I'm not a huge dude. I probably would have already been stabbed if not for carrying a firearm during some of the questionable encounters I've had up there.
What do you propose for my use case?
> My question to you is why you see that as more of a risk than suicide?
If I decide to kill myself, then I've died with consent. Might happen eventually-- maybe I'll have a bad health diagnosis or something-- I'm not concerned about the "risk".
Ok! I think you're considerably overestimating the likelihood of needing to defend yourself with the type of gun you think you need. A bolt action 22 is enough for pretty much anyone, and we really need to weigh up whether the increased risk of handguns and assault rifles is worth their availability.
> If I decide to kill myself, then I've died with consent.
If you consider people with mental illness as being able to consent rationally, sure.
> Might happen eventually-- maybe I'll have a bad health diagnosis or something-- I'm not concerned about the "risk".
Like I said earlier, rural men are at very high risk of mental illness and suicide, regardless of having a bad health diagnosis. Suicide significantly increases in times of drought, by the way.
Owning a gun also significantly increases the risk of death by suicide. You'd be unequivocally less at risk of dying of gunshot wounds or suffering a gun-related injury if you didn't own a gun. Stay safe out there!
OK. I think you heavily overestimate your own level of knowledge and understanding on this topic.
> A bolt action 22 is enough for pretty much anyone,
This is a terrible defensive choice. It is unlikely to be available if needed, and doesn't work well at short-moderate range. Longer ranges are too far for credible self defense. Also, the lethality is limited; you're going to need to get lucky to stop someone from stabbing the fuck out of you.
There are a whole lot of sketchy people who come out because the area is isolated and police response is slow.
I'm not rural BTW; I just spend a couple months a year up there recreationally.
> assault rifles is worth their availability.
Civilian semi-auto rifles use in crime (which aren't "assault rifles" btw)-- and in suicide-- is negligible. It's rounding error on the statistics.
> Owning a gun also significantly increases the risk of death by suicide.
Correlation equals causation, amirite? Risk of non-gun suicide increases with firearm ownership, but it's still clearly causative. ;)
I did talk about range. I did talk about deterrence rather than stopping power.
> There are a whole lot of sketchy people who come out because the area is isolated and police response is slow. > > I'm not rural BTW; I just spend a couple months a year up there recreationally.
I grew up in a rural area, I own rural property and I will be back for Christmas. I think you have some odd ideas about why people live in rural areas.
> Civilian semi-auto rifles use in crime (which aren't "assault rifles" btw)-- and in suicide-- is negligible. It's rounding error on the statistics.
If you get rid of your guns in a rural area, your chance of dying from both suicide and murder, drops. Do you need an assault rifle (I didn't mention semi-auto rifles) to defend against meth heads with knives?
> Correlation equals causation, amirite? Risk of non-gun suicide increases with firearm ownership, but it's still clearly causative. ;)
Actually, some studies have found a slight negative correlation for other types of suicide when people own guns. Haven't seen one yet that says the risk increases for non-gun suicides.
This comment of yours is just another example of that when you ask "Do you need an assault rifle (I didn't mention semi-auto rifles) to defend against meth heads with knives?"
Is it your understanding that any of the firearms being discussed are assault rifles? That's pretty damning.
AR-15 stands for assault rifle 15 lol
So I'm guessing you're pro gun control - considering you're ok with the control of assault rifles? Just an example. Lets control some of the most dangerous guns. No miniguns please. Also tighter controls on handguns.
That's the joke. I thought the "lol" I put at the end of that phrase would really sell that fact.
> assault rifles are already heavily controlled.
Awesome! Perhaps we can better control other guns for which self-defence is not a valid justification.
I have odd ideas about the behavior of itinerants who pass through rural areas. It's amazing the amount of crime you can have when law enforcement effectively doesn't exist.
> Do you need an assault rifle (I didn't mention semi-auto rifles) to defend against meth heads with knives?
Civilians (with exceptions for grandfathered items before 1984 and manufacturers, etc) can't legally own anything that meets the real definition of "assault rifle". Things people call "assault weapons" are often synonymous with a subset of semi-auto rifles. If semi-auto rifles are nearly irrelevant in violent crime epidemiology, subsets of them are even more so. :P
Handguns are the weapon of choice for ordinary defense scenarios, because they can be readily carried, have a muzzle energy that limits overpenetration risks, and can be positively controlled by the wielder even in short-range engagement scenarios.
I "need" "assault rifles" (which they're not) because I shoot them in competitive events and for fun and training. They're not a particularly good choice for suicide; they're not really that useful in crime scenarios; they are good at marksmanship and plinking. They're functionally identical to other semi-automatic rifles.
> Actually, some studies have found a slight negative correlation for other types of suicide when people own guns. Haven't seen one yet that says the risk increases for non-gun suicides.
First, Ludwig and Cook performed a time-series analysis of the Brady law and found a statistically significant reduction in gun suicide rates after the law's passage, but a non-statistically significant change in suicide rates. So that right there is enough to question the efficacy of what you suggest (gun control as a mechanism to prevent suicide).
In 2004, the NRC said:
> There is also cross-sectional, ecological association between gun ownership and overall risk of suicide, but this association is more modest than the association between gun ownership and gun suicide; it is less consistently observed across time, place, and persons; and the causal relation remains unclear
It's a bit dubious that internet-rando-from-outside-the-US can be trusted to confidently proclaim the efficacy of gun control as a suicide reduction technique when the nation's research academies are not so sure. ;)
Also a surprisingly large fraction of guns used in suicide are purchased shortly before death, which calls into question the efficacy of removing guns from households as a means to prevent suicide.
But for what I directly asserted, "Guns and Suicide,” , Duggan (2003) found a positive correlation between firearm prevalence and nonfirearm suicide. “The Epidemiology of Case Fatality Rates for Suicide in the Northeast,”, Miller, 2004 found a positive correlation between firearm prevalence and nonfirearm suicide attempts. The finding that high firearm prevalence is correlated with increased nonfirearm suicide rates is also supported by multiple analyses by different authors of the CDC's BRFSS data.
But anyways-- time for me to move on. We're down in the weeds and won't be read by others; the stuff you assert seems to vary between uninformed and dubious; and neither of us is gonna convince the other.
It isn't really, because we have lots of other evidence to show that reducing access to means and methods is useful.
Mann JJ et al(2005), "Authors identified 6 studies that have demonstrated a decrease in firearms-related suicides after introduction of firearm control legislation, two of which also proved a positive effect on overall suicide rates without substitution of methods (in Canada and the USA"
Lambert MT, Silva PS(1998) "This review concludes that reducing the availability and accessibility of firearms appears to decrease firearms-related suicide rates without this leading to substitution of means of suicide"
There are others.
But let's assume that method substitution does happen immediately: that's still a good thing, because it means that fewer people will die.
"While firearms are used in less than six percent of suicide attempts, over half of suicide deaths are with firearms." - Miller M, Azrael D, Barber C. Suicide mortality in the United States: the importance of attending to method in understanding population-level disparities in the burden of suicide. Annual Review of Public Health. 2012;33:393–408.
You're already measuring the lethality of the suicide method in the reviews you cited, because the studies involved measured actual suicide rates and not attempts. So let's not double count any effect or handwave away any failure to show an effect based on dubious logic.
> two of which also proved a positive effect on overall suicide rates
Another way to put this is that four of six studies failed to show an effect. ;) The language "proved" here is a little loaded compared to what's usually used in meta-analyses and systemic reviews for this exact reason.
> "While firearms are used in less than six percent of suicide attempts, over half of suicide deaths are with firearms."
One way to interpret this: people who choose to commit suicide spin a roulette wheel to pick suicide method (or pick whatever is convenient), and the people who pick firearms die more.
Another way to interpret this: people who are more determined to die choose more lethal suicide attempt methods, implement them better, and then die at a higher rate. Firearms are one "more lethal" choice.
Truth is probably somewhere in-between... Everyone knows that hanging is a lot more lethal than overdose attempts, and is roughly equally convenient/available. Including the people committing suicide.
We can even see e.g. research has shown that people who attempt a more lethal method and fail are more likely to successfully commit suicide later-- even when the later method is different.
In any event, I do not really like banning things to avoid possible damage people might do to themselves with those things. There's all kinds of things we could get rid of that would cause a big, clearer improvement to public health at a cost to personal liberty (cigarettes, motorcycles, fast food, processed meats, poutine, etc)...
This is great because the self-defence argument isn't applicable at all for these guns, then. Hooray!
> It's a bit dubious that internet-rando-from-outside-the-US
This seems a little emotional. You're an "internet-rando" too.
> First, Ludwig and Cook performed a time-series analysis of the Brady law and found a statistically significant reduction in gun suicide rates after the law's passage, but a non-statistically significant change in suicide rates. So that right there is enough to question the efficacy of what you suggest (gun control as a mechanism to prevent suicide).
Is this the same Ludwig and Cook that found in 2004 that handgun owners accounted for a much higher rate of suicides than long rifles? That's one of the reasons I suggest owning a 22 bolt action.
I'm curious about what mechanism you think explains the result that owning a gun increases the non-gun suicide rate. Many meta-analyses across studies such as Santaella-Tenorio's in 2016 which stretches across 10 countries and 130 studies, suggest a strong link between better gun control and less gun violence and suicide.
> But anyways-- time for me to move on. We're down in the weeds and won't be read by others; the stuff you assert seems to vary between uninformed and dubious; and neither of us is gonna convince the other.
I'm really interested in how people form beliefs about their safety in the world, and this has been informative. Thanks!
But you ignored the whole actual line of argument around the guns used for defense, so you could get a little snipey comment in here.
> I'm curious about what mechanism you think explains the result that owning a gun increases the non-gun suicide rate.
Do you think that people who choose to own guns are identical to people who don't? Do you think attempts to pick a few controlling variables to try and even out the populations makes a difference? Maybe there are differences in values and personality attributes between gun owners and non-gun owners?
Seriously, everyone knows that epidemiological studies, and even case control studies suck, in large part because of just how prone they are to finding associations that are actually caused by unmeasured factors that affect multiple measured variables.
> Is this the same Ludwig and Cook that found in 2004 that handgun owners accounted for a much higher rate of suicides than long rifles? That's one of the reasons I suggest owning a 22 bolt action.
Again, handgun owners have different underlying beliefs and demographics than people who only own rifles. And if you're going to buy a weapon just for suicide, everyone knows a rifle is less convenient than a handgun and only equally effective. But-- if one were to accept your argument-- this further "exonerates" "assault rifles". ;)
I'm done with your cherrypicking of arguments and sniping at little passages. Have a nice day.
What argument negates the fact that owning a gun is dangerous for the owner, in some of the exact ways a gun is meant to defend against (and some of the ways rural men seem to think they're immune to)?
> Seriously, everyone knows that epidemiological studies, and even case control studies suck, in large part because of just how prone they are to finding associations that are actually caused by unmeasured factors that affect multiple measured variables.
What superior alternative are you proposing?
> And if you're going to buy a weapon just for suicide, everyone knows a rifle is less convenient than a handgun and only equally effective.
Again, this is precisely one of the reasons why I recommend owning a 22 bolt action.
Reducing access to means and methods is one of the most important suicide prevention measures we can take. It's a key part of any national suicide prevention strategy.
> because even without a gun, someone may have a rope on hand, or a bottle of pills.
People tend to have a preferred method, and method substitution takes years. But assume they do instantly switch from using a gun to using some other method: that's still beneficial, because they've switched from something that's very lethal to something that's probably less lethal.
Even more interesting to me is the idea that the American government has such a hold over the patriots in the military that they could be commanded to enforce tyranny.
Or, that owning an assault rifle is some antidote against the best funded military in the world, which has been fighting armed insurgencies for years.
Consider this though, we have repeatedly conducted studies that show bringing a gun into your house increases the chance of gun death.
Maybe, perhaps, given the chance, gun ownership will help stave off tyranny.
Tyranny generally doesn't come overnight. There are plenty of things you can ask soldiers to do that they'll feel uncomfortable about but still do it, and then in eighteen months when it's time to reenlist they decline. A decade later you've got only zealots.
> Or, that owning an assault rifle is some antidote against the best funded military in the world, which has been fighting armed insurgencies for years.
Because we sure handed it to those Iraqis, and the Vietnamese before that.
Counter-insurgency is hard. Having planes and nukes doesn't help you when the bridges and cities are friendly assets. Morale is low when you're fighting your own people. You can't guard every military resource with hundreds of soldiers, but that means the one guarded by twenty can be overrun by a hundred civilians if they're armed.
And it only takes one bullet to kill Hitler.
If I recall correctly they both lost and lost their rights - whether we consider those rights the right to own slaves or leave the union.
> But an insurgency requires a sufficient number of people who feel strongly enough to take up arms.
Not true. "The accidental guerilla" by David Kilcullen is a great book on this idea. I'm wondering though for what reason you feel the confederates felt less strongly than gun owners do today.
Guns don't help with that goal. Having a gun makes you more likely to die of gunshot wounds, either self-inflicted or by others.
We agree.
I also think that by some tragic circumstance or another a lot of those mentally ill people have no friends or family to support them. I'm happy to pay the government to care for those "idiots", to be frank.
What do you think?
Barring that, we already have measures in place (e.g. involuntary hospitalization) for the acutely suicidal. For others, why stop at taking away their guns? Take away their kitchen knives, Tylenol, and spare rope while you're at it. Hell, throw them in a padded cell so they aren't tempted to visit any bridges or tall buildings. Taking away guns doesn't treat the actual problem.
Suicide rates are: 21.1/100k for US males 17.4/100k for Australian males
Guess you aren't paying enough?
How many people do you know who brought a gun into their house solely for protection against someone with a gun?
The correlation between guns and gun violence and injuries undermines any claim that owning a gun increases liberty or enables self-defence.
1) a survey on firearms-related deaths that doesn't even look at in-home use or defensive vs offensive use.
2) A review of 26-year-old death certificates. Did you read this part? "Blacks, persons less than 35 years of age or older than age 100 years, and persons who died from external causes of homicide, suicide, and unintentional injury were oversampled in this survey."
3) Uses same cooked data as #2, study done by an anti-gun interest group (VPC).
4) Again uses the same cooked data from 26 years ago.
5) A thirty-year-old phone survey that doesn't even examine in-home gun use. Seriously?
So, no, none of those is "evidence" of anything. Now, how many of those were you previously familiar with vs just googling on "gun death home study
Ok. How do you want me to look for the data?
> 1) a survey on firearms-related deaths that doesn't even look at in-home use or defensive vs offensive use.
It's not just a survey.
> 2) A review of 26-year-old death certificates. Did you read this part? "Blacks, persons less than 35 years of age or older than age 100 years, and persons who died from external causes of homicide, suicide, and unintentional injury were oversampled in this survey."
Oversampling doesn't invalidate studies. Are you annoyed they acknowledged it? A less rigorous study wouldn't.
> 3) Uses same cooked data as #2, study done by an anti-gun interest group (VPC).
What neutral groups do you think are studying this stuff? The CDC? Well, they can start now.
> 4) Again uses the same cooked data from 26 years ago. > > 5) A thirty-year-old phone survey that doesn't even examine in-home gun use. Seriously?
Could you help me understand what you'd consider "evidence", considering you won't accept articles from peer-reviewed journals. Why does suicide or homicide have to happen "in-home" for it to be valid?
I'll provide more references if you can explain exactly what evidence would satisfy you. Otherwise it seems like a waste of time on my part.
How do you want me to look for the data?
Often when I'm google searching its because I remember the title of something or the general concept. Its something lots of young people do these days rather than printing articles out to scrapbook or saving them to desktop or whatever it is old people do.
Let me know what evidence would satisfy you that owning a gun increases the chance of dying via gun. Cheers.
Prepare for some kind of snarky defense of a flawed "correlation is causation" argument.
This supposed factoid is frequently repeated in these sorts of discussions about gun-related data, but I have never been presented with convincing findings that support the thrust of this argument. Is this more true for guns than any other object? Is there such a strong casual relationship between proximity and firearms and subsequent injuries and deaths to overcome the other aspects of the discussion?
Every time it comes to actual hard-hitting facts, this argument seems to fall apart. Perhaps you can help me understand its basis better?
What other aspect of the discussion do you feel undermines the point that owning a gun actually measurably reduces personal liberty via death? What hard hitting facts do you think are missing here?
2) Many decisions in life come with risks: the decision to own a car or swimming pool puts you much closer to the most frequent causes of death for people under the age of 35. But people make rational decisions to do these things anyway and then mitigate the risks in ways that they see fit.
What do you say to this?
> What do you say to this?
I have to say: I think that you have stopped making sense or putting in any effort to this discussion so I'm just going to move on.
I fully acknowledge and think it is an absolute tragedy that veterans can't access the support services they need, and I think that problem, and the problem of mental health issues in America could be mostly addressed by a better healthcare system.
For many of the gun suicides and some of the murders though, better gun control is effective.
That's assuming that the reason for lumping them together is an attempt to justify policy.
One counter argument to gun control seems to be that gun ownership is a way to preserve liberty and defend the home. It has been repeatedly and consistently found that gun ownership leads to an increase in gun related injuries and deaths for the owners - which undermines those arguments about liberty and home defence, regardless of the type of injury or death.
It's hard to defend anything or have liberty when you're dead.