In the year since Adam Lanza used a Bushmaster rifle to gun down 20 children in Newtown, Conn., the discourse on gun control has focused on mass shootings and homicides. That’s not surprising: Terrible events dominate the cable news cycle, and murders get reported every day in our nation’s newspapers.
But if we want to talk about the effects of guns, we should remember this: In a typical year, suicides outnumber homicides by 3 to 1 and a majority of suicides are by firearm. Suicides come in ones and twos, here and there; they rarely make the national news, and when they are reported at all they are veiled in euphemism (“He died suddenly”).
Suicides go so underreported that Slate’s Gun Deaths Project, which collects data from news articles and other online sources, categorizes only roughly one-tenth of the reported deaths as suicides.
The national conversation about guns, and about gun control, should include the relationship between guns and suicide. We recently analyzed a decade’s worth of data on guns and suicides in the United States and we found that the relationship is clear: more guns, more suicides.
i wonder what's it gonna take to get those lawmakers to decide the world won't end because joey had to get a background check or how many joeys got denied because of them, do thwey have tro staert losing their ;loved ones to gun fire in order to do something?
there's always been that "well it's not affecting me" mentality when it comes to republican law making, does matter if their base gets it but not in their yard not their problem.
why do they have to decide anything look at the freakin' news that's as dumb as republicans cooperating with the Dems to avoid they're the republicans shut down of the gov't twice in one year 2014?
then again makes sense cause that's election year how transparent of them.
Suicide is neglected compared with the large quantity of research on the relationship between homicides and guns, a relationship which remains controversial because it’s difficult to demonstrate causality. Places with lots of guns may have high homicide rates, but is this because guns cause homicide or because homicides cause people to buy guns?Or could a third factor—say, a general lack of social trust or high violence in a region—be causing both homicides and gun possession? The relationship between suicides and guns is much easier to tackle because it’s unlikely that an increase in the number of suicides in a community would cause an increase in local gun ownership.
So in a new paper published in the International Review of Law and Economics, we studied the relationship between guns and suicide in the U.S. from 2000 to 2009. Using five measures of gun ownership and controlling for other factors associated with suicide, such as mental illness,we consistently found that each 1 percentage-point increase in household gun ownership rates leads to between 0.5 and 0.9 percent more suicides. Or, to put it the other way, a percentage-point decrease in household gun ownership leads to between 0.5 and 0.9 percent fewer suicides.
so they are saying they care more about the 5% paying more for a better plan that they would find insufficient if they ever needed it than .9% that might be still ,living with gun control in law? once again money means more than life to the republicans.
