An inconvenient truth ignored... (again) [Research on firearms in the home]

Same thing

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...isk-suicide/o3yeImXGGmMRI48eeQInUO/story.html

This article said a lot of the same things. The article said something about taking away guns from at risk people being a better measure for suicide prevention than counseling and other methods. I am not sure about that. That is kindof like saying boys can't get their drivers license until they are 25 because they are at a high risk for accidents. Not a perfect analogy, but none are.

http://www.guncite.com/cummingsjama.html
This one appeared to be a pretty good article outlining how thier conclusion was made and everything. It seemed to say that a gun in the home made the completion of the suicide act more likely, but not that gun owners were more suicidal. The conclusion said that more research needed to be done on gun storage and stuff. I have been taught that responsible gun ownership (especially with children) is to have the gun locked up and the ammo stored separately. I don't know about using the gun for protection and having it ready. There is another topic on this forum that says opposite things about guns being a deterrant and stuff.
 
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Yep, and a car in the garage probably makes the owner more likely to be in a vehicle crash or arrested for DUI.

Statistics are like balloon animals, you can decide just how to twist them into the animal you want them to be...

I usually stop listening when the talking head says "...A new study shows...."
 
A tool in the home increases the risk of being injuried by that tool, be it a gun, a saw, a stove, a car, a knife, a garbage disposal, a mower, an espresso machine, a blender, scissors, food processor, pressure cooker and let's not forget the deep fryers. So let's get busy and clear our homes of all these dangerous items before tragedy strikes.

"Live Long and Proper"
 
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that statistically, they are probably right. Many successful suicides are spur-of-the-moment decisions. Having easy access to a firearm...
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I'm on that limb too, now lets see if & how it bends, breaks, or gets sawed off...

Sure, removing the gun from the suicidal persons reach makes good sense, if you don't want them to do it with a gun. But let me point out that when you make that decision, you have already decided that the (supposed) suicidal person is no longer capable of making their own decisions. This is why you commit them, and why there is the legal authority to do so.

And its a long established practice. The urgency of risk in a suicide situation means the subject gets "protected" first, and then the legal process of them being competent gets worked out. Quite a different situation than the person who is deemed incompetent, but harmless.

None of these studies ever mention how many times a gun was available to a suicide victim and passed over as the method of choice.
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At the risk of revealing too much of my character, this one made me laugh...

No, they never do seem to study that, but then, WHO ARE THEY GOING TO ASK?:D

Take a look around at the laws, suicide isn't a crime. Attempted suicide breaks the law in many places, suicide does not. After all, what's the point?

I know its common use, but victim of suicide is as bad in its way as assault weapon or any of the other misleading gun terms we all hate.

Saying victim implies its not a choice. That's not so. It is a choice. Bad choice, lots of people think, but it is a choice. I try to look at it simply, if one dies from something (anything) that is not their choice, then it can be a lot of different things, but, it isn't suicide.
 
I like how they weight the societal costs and risks of firearms ownership after casually stating that, 'there is little evidence a firearm reduces the risk of homicide'; I've seen convincing evidence that firearms DO prevent violent crime, both academic and personal.

If only we could make lying somehow expensive, or painful, most of this type of reporting would instantly stop.

Larry
 
Remember when reporting about shootings ,the antis changed the FBI reportings from " known to" to "friend of " ? If they repeat the lies often people believe it !
 
I would like to see someone who clearly does not have a bias toward gun control looking at the raw data and seeing if they reach the same or different conclusions. Someone like John Lott who has debunked many of the other so-called studies, such as the famous one that stated "you are 43 times more likely to die if you keep a gun in your home" that is still repeated and referred to by the anti-gun zealots.
 
The presence of a firearm in the home makes suicide by firearm more likely than in a home without firearms, but as has been pointed out already, that's an essentially meaningless statistic.

However, one point is that suicide attempts with firearms tend to be more successful than other attempts.

So all else being equal, you might expect to see slightly more completed suicides in a home with firearms compared to a demographically similar one without.

For whatever that's worth, which I doubt is much as far as practical policy goes.
 
Like them or not, facts are facts.

Statistically, the only guaranteed way to prevent a home invasion is to not have a home.

All you people with guns and homes must hate your families. For shame...
 
Does someone have a link to the study itself?

When this news was printed in our local newspaper, there was a clarification that the 'access to firearms' data was "a gun owned by famliy, friends or neighbors.
So, I did some quick mental math and thought: lessee: 40% ish of US homes own a gun of some stripe.
If I am a normal person:
I have a neighbor on each side of me: 2
My parents have house: 1
I have at least one sibling: 1
I have at least 2 friends: 2
So a total of 6 basic possibilities of households which might give me access to a firearm. 40% of 6 is (bad math): 2.5. So, if I completely discount geography and demographics and social conditions, if the researchers asked about firearm ownersihp at 3 related households (1 family, 1 friend, 1 neighbor), there's probably someone with a gun. I have no idea how far they threw the net, but it's not hard to find someone who could "give access" to a firearm.

Why do I bring this up? So, in my house, my father had a shotgun. he kept it at work, b/c he worked in a sketchy part of town. He kept a baseball bat under his bed at home. That was probably fine for 1972. Anyhow, if I had killed myself by turning on my car in a closed garage, my death could have been included in this study as a "suicide in a house with a firearm."
lies, damn lies, statistics.
 
Whenever anyone talks about risk (of anything) and uses the phrase "2 or 3 times more likely to..." it means that they don't have any real numbers that mean anything.
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Huh. I didn't see that phrase in the actual study.

What you were citing was not actually the study

http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1814426

but a reporter synopsis of the study.

Researchers found people who lived in homes with firearms were between two and three times more likely to die from either cause, compared to those who lived in homes without guns.
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http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/...ld-increase-in-suicide-risk/?intcmp=obnetwork

So on one hand, you are correct in your assessment in that "they," the reporter, didn't pay attention to the study. However, as a critique of the study, complete with quote marks, your claim is invalid and you missed an excellent opportunity to make a valid point by not going to the original source.

The study does cite specific numbers, not that there isn't a significant failure in their use, as noted by 2damnold4this.

Nothing wrong with being critical, but it is important to be critical of the correct source that you are citing and not to confuse the difference between what a reporter is summarizing versus what is actually said in a study.


We have fewer suicides per capita than just about any other first-world country. That includes many countries that supposedly have a higher standard of living than ours.
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Given the list of per capita suicides you note from your source

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/suiciderate.html

and a characterization of what are first world countries from here...

http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/first_world.htm
http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/third_world_countries.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World

...the US does NOT have fewer suicides that just about any other first-world country. We aren't 2nd or 3rd. We aren't even 6th. We are 8th. The only one on the list with less than us that isn't 1st world is Mexico.
 
Opposing Methods

To me it looked like the Harvard study in the original post and the study in the link above took two different approaches and so are like comparing apples to oranges. The Harvard study took a national, widespread approach and the annals study took a more individual approach. I think the Harvard study made a very good point.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf

"But*even*so,*American*homicide*is*driven*by*socio‐economic*
and*cultural*factors*that*keep*it*far*higher*than*the*comparable*
rate*of*homicide*in*most*European*nations."

That study was really well written in my opinion. Easy to read anyway. The annals study touches on the socio-economic factor particularly relating to homicides and how most of the homicides were on women and how it was mostly someone they knew/domestic violence. Suicide also has a lot of socio-economic factors. Urban areas where gun ownership is less prevalent and historically more restrictive have higher homicide rates than rural areas where there are more guns. But on the other side, suicide rates are higher in rural areas.

The Harvard study brings up the topic of firearms as a deterrent for violence which is on another topic on this forum I may have been merged, not sure sorry. From reading both and my own biases I am leaning towards firearms as a tool (another post put it much better) and not necessarily the cause or something to blame for anything.
 
Whenever anyone talks about risk (of anything) and uses the phrase "2 or 3 times more likely to..." it means that they don't have any real numbers that mean anything.

Huh. I didn't see that phrase in the actual study.

What you were citing was not actually the study
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You are right, I wasn't citing the actual study. Nor did I mean to. My comment was intended to be more of a general comment on the report, not the details of the study itself.

Because, in reality, lots of people will only look at the headline blurb /reporter's comments, and take them as "fact".
 
You are right, I wasn't citing the actual study. Nor did I mean to. My comment was intended to be more of a general comment on the report, not the details of the study itself.
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Sorry, I missed that when you said that they didn't have any real numbers when the real numbers did exist in the actual study about which the reporter was summarizing.
 
Let me be unpopular and say guns probably do play a role in suicides.

Someone who's going to kill themselves and has access to a gun is going to think about that gun. It's also known to be fast and easy. Cutting your wrists is painful and once you've finished one, or both, you still have time to act and save your life if you change your mind. Tying a noose to hang yourself with is time consuming, and leaving the car running in the garage leaves you to think about it.

With a gun, you know if you do it right it will be quick and it will likely be done right. A chart I read placed shotgun suicide fatality rates at something like 98.9%, the highest of any method. Handgun suicide was lower, but still in the top 5 most effective methods. It's quick. If you do it right (wrong?), there's no time to second guess. I think it also cuts out a lot of doubt. There's no thinking "Can I tie this right?" "Do I have the willpower to cut my wrists?" There's none of the self doubt of whether or not you can figure out how to operate a safety.

I think having a gun in the house probably does spur a certain small number, whether statistically significant or not. I don't think we need to be trying to legislate an answer to it, but they should be locked up around kids and anyone you know or think to be unstable or even having a particularly tough time.

Some people will find another way. Others might not have if they weren't given a tool with great opportunity to use it for such.
 
Tools

I agree with you Dakota-Potts. You put that in a way that made sense. A firearm is probably the right tool for the job. They should be locked up with kids, clinically depressed, etc. I wasn't doing a good job, but I was trying to say something along the lines of the original post, why are they suicidal in the first place? It isn't because there is a gun in the house, that just means there is a tool ready to use. A gun in the house has to be in the back of your mind as an easy option. That might be why the domestic violence turning to homicides is higher, too. A tool is readily available. I don't know what triggers people to do something like that. I don't know of any statistics but suicide is not always an impulse decision, so there are warning signs and time to lock up stuff in many cases, not all I am sure. The signs are hard to see often too. Domestic situations with people with a history of violence and access to a firearm are scary. This is probably unpopular, too but those kinds of histories should be warning signs not to have guns, too.

Greece and Macedonia might be a good case study. In the Harvard study, both countries had low homicide rates, and many guns. I think I was reading that right. With the economic collapse over there the suicide rate sky-rocketed. Homicide rates held steady. Greece is still among the leaders in guns/capita. Socio-economic factors really seem to be the driving force. Off topic again, but the video games and movies in American culture might be a cultural factor to look at. For some reason US has a higher homicide rate than Greece and most of Europe. One is too many, and I think it is worth looking into to figure out how to lower the rate for both suicide and homicide.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/10/greece-suicides_n_3900906.html

The Washington Post link above was for pre-economic colllapse (2005) in Greece. Greece was lowest for all countries. After the economic collapse? increase of 45% according to this article.

http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5/compare?country=gr#country=gr:us

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gun_ownership

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate

The US is ranked 33rd on this list with Greece going up to 87th highest from 2009 data. The data is from just after US economic troubles started,too and suicide rates are up.
 
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