Firearms, background checks, and suicide...

Over at Firearms and Freedom there's some discussion about the effect of federal versus local background checks on the rate of suicide by firearm. He gets a little bit into the numbers, but it's not actually necessary. I can tell just from a few words that the study he's reading won't tell us anything useful.

Not quite sure what to make of this, but the Medical College of Wisconsin released a study that gun suicide and homicide rates were about 25% lower in states that did local background checks as opposed to state or federal checks.

Examining "gun" suicide and homicide rates will never be productive. In order to have any real point you have to study whether there are overall differences in suicides or homicides. After all, someone who commits suicide or is murdered will be just as dead whether they were killed with a gun or a knife or someone's bare hands.

I've always been a little puzzled by the persistent desire to examine "gun" deaths rather than "overall" deaths. It's not inconceivable that restrictions on firearms would reduce the number of successful murders and suicides. For example, in theory, someone who has been recently hospitalized as a suicide risk might show up on a background check as having mental health issues resulting in a denial of purchase, and then not have the willpower to go through with a more elaborate and painful method. Or, similarly, someone who shows up as a criminal on a background check could be arrested by the police before finding other means to commit the intended crime.

Yet we continually see studies examing "gun" deaths, rather than "overall" deaths.

That tells me that someone in the anti-gun community has done the studies, at least informally, and found that there is no difference, or even worse, that the legal availability of firearms reduces the homicide and suicide rate. That someone must have put out the word not to study the issue, because the studies would result in nothing at all or even in active damage to "the cause".

I can't think of any other reason for this peculiar consistency.

Does anyone have any good studies addressing this point?

Posted on 2008-06-09 15:28:23.0 by matthew@triggerfinger.org

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