You are probably tongue in cheek there, but I DO actually think that legalization of drugs would have a much larger effect on crime and murders in the US than even the most fantastical dreams of the most fervent gun banning advocate out there. If deaths were REALLY the point, there are a lot of things we could do that would be more beneficial in our society to save lives than banning guns. But it’s not really the point, IMHO.
Well, not really cheek-tongued at all, actually. Legalizing drugs, starting with marijuana, is probably a much easier sell in the U.S. than banning guns. I look forward to the resullts of the ongoing Canadian experiment.
Marijuana is, to my mind, an especially stupid thing to be illegal, but basically IMHO if we legalized all drugs then it would be a lot easier to help those afflicted by drug dependencies, and it would cut down on the amount of crime associated with drug abuse and illegal drug users (or hell, even the ones that abuse legal but restricted drugs). It would help alleviate some of our judicial backlog, clear out a lot of the prisons and basically allow the police to focus on other things. It’s a win/win all around IMHO.
I do think that Canadian as well as other countries (and even some states) pushing the envelop on marijuana will eventually cause this to be mostly legalized in the US, which alone should have a pretty big impact on all the things above.
I dont see where they can print that kind of steel or springs, etc. Not to mention ammo. Yes, a one shot disposable “zip gun” can be made, and could cause problems later.
You raised this in the other thread that touched on this topic. I’m sorry you still haven’t read the paper. It won’t take long. It’s 2.5 pages, and contains three tables from two data sets. It’s still a waste of your time, however, because
a) It’s from 1968
b) The US data is from 1958
c) Such analysis as they squeezed in to the last two paragraphs would embarrass an undergraduate.
This is not a good or useful cite, in any way.
Wishy-washiness is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but I don’t agree. The empirical research could have rebutted the claim that firearms increase suicide risk by showing no association between the two. The fact that the data from 14 US-based studies (conducted this century, I might add) consistently shows that association exists is valuable evidence.
Similarly, the fact that there is a clear logical/theoretical model linking firearm prevalence with suicide risk really matters because it gives us good reason to reject the notion that this association is mere spurious happenstance.
In short:
We have a theory - that easy access to a quick, painless and effective method of suicide will be a contributing factor to both suicide attempts and completed suicides. We have a hypothesis: that gun availability is linked with total suicide rates. We have empirical evidence that fails to reject this hypothesis. As a basis for public policy, that is a really strong evidence base.
For someone who argues that culture is a a more important factor than firearm availability in determining suicide rates you have a notable aversion to quoting US-based studies. This is a shame as you could have quoted:
Briggs and Tabarok, 2014, which shows a 1% increase in firearms ownership leads to, depending on your measure of firearm ownership, between a 0.5 and 0.9% increase in the total suicide rate;
Miller et al, 2006, which shows a 10% decrease in firearms ownership leads to 2.5% decrease in total suicide.
Rodriguez Andrés and Hempstead, 2011, which showed that gun ownership rate was associated with increases in total suicide rate
Miller, Azrael, and Hemenway, 2004, which showed a positive correlation between firearm prevalence and total suicides among men
Miller et al, 2009 which shows a positive association between firearm ownership and total suicide
Kubrin and Wadsworth, 2009, which also shows that link, this time between men under 35 “with some suggestion that gun availability mediates the effect of structural disadvantage and suicide among black males.”
Also Kposowa 2013, Smith and Kawachi, 2014, Kposowa, Hamilton, and Wang, 2016 and so on and so on.
Indeed. The standards of epidemiological research have been set by medical studies which can control everything to the nth degree. Public health, which necessarily involves uncontrollable variables, will never reach these standards. Withholding action until that standard is achieved is a recipe for paralysis - if we had followed that strategy, John Snow would never have removed the Broad Street pump handle.
I understand that people may very well feel that the evidence available doesn’t reach their particular threshold for action. I won’t quibble. I would say that given the evidence we have, the certainty expressed by XT, Bear_Nenno and yourself that there cannot possibly be a link between suicide rates and gun prevalence, or that no material benefit would be gained from reduced gun prevalence is simply not justified.
And in the spirit of the thread, I’d suggest that the recommendation from the above cite that
is a good one, not least because it gives us the best chance of getting the robust analysis that improve the evidence for or against the causal link.
If they actually understood guns and gun violence, they wouldn’t be so focused on things like assault weapons bans.
They wouldn’t keep insisting that guns are not well regulated.
They wouldn’t focus so much on mass shootings.
There’s a lot of things they wouldn’t do if they weren’t so ignorant.
But in response to the OP’s question:
Constitutional right or not, regulations are just as permissible for guns as they are for speech. I think that a regime of licensing and registration would make a difference over the long term.
I think Hurricane Ditka is saying that deterrence is an example of something that only affects potential criminals. I don’t think that it is appropriate to insist that regulation impose no burden on gun owners. It is clearly constitutional to place some regulatory burden on gun owners.
I agree, the federal government should “occupy the field,” invalidating all state and local gun regulations. We should have a single standard for guns across the country in most respects regarding concealed carry and who can own a gun however I would say that a small carve out is permissible to the occupation of the field to take into account the differences between downtown San Francisco and the rural areas in Idaho.
Interesting. In the US, we are currently at a 14% decrease in firearms ownership per household. So, according to your stats here, we should be seeing a substantial decline in suicides. I have to ask you…are we? Because according to what I’m seeing, suicide rate is actually up.
How does that match up with the predictions here? A quick Google search shows a decline in household gun ownership from 1990-2014 of nearly 20%, while the suicide rate has increased by 24% during that same time frame. Why?
I don’t think there is a direct, causal link between guns and suicide, no, and I’ve yet to see any evidence there is one. I’ve seen and looked at the studies you posted, and others before, but I haven’t found any of them compelling because they don’t seem to address the main sticking point for me, which is why do countries that often have very restrictive gun access also have higher suicide rates than the US, where guns are…well, not ubiquitous, but certainly very numerous? The US, according to what you have presented, should have one of the if not the highest suicide rate on the planet with our access to guns. Look at what just the part I quoted says: “1% increase in firearms ownership leads to, depending on your measure of firearm ownership, between a 0.5 and 0.9% increase in the total suicide rate”. Firearms ownership rose nearly 4% in 1990, yet the suicide rate (admittedly high compared to today) was flat and after 1990 started a slow trend downward until the late around 2007 when it started up again. Yet it started up again as gun ownership per household was falling in the US (with a few brief spikes, but not getting back to the point it had previously been).
To me, the data is too nebulous to put pin this on firearms. There are a lot of other things in play. Addressing a method to commit suicide doesn’t address the causes of suicide, and I don’t think taking a method, any method out of play is going to have more than a short term effect. Eventually, people will find other ways because you haven’t addressed WHY they are wanting to commit suicide, just taking a method out of play. But methods of suicide change for societies over time anyway, as some things come into or go out of favor. In just about each culture there are aversions to some kinds of suicide methods, and some that are in favor or used more. With firearms, I think what we see is that in many countries they aren’t favored, while in the US, especially apparently for older men, they are.
This thread isn’t intended as a debate about what would be Constitutional or not. k9bfriender had said: “If it is made just a tiny bit harder to get a gun, then it is the outlaws who will encounter the difficulties, not the law abiding.” It occurred to me that if he’s right, if there is indeed some gun control policy where “it is the outlaws that will encounter the difficulties, not the law abiding”, that this would represent some ‘low-hanging fruit’ that both sides of the RKBA debate might readily agree to.
You know, when I listed those studies I nearly put in a note to the effect that they controlled for various confounding factors such as health, age, race, relative measures of poverty, alcohol use, drug use, etc. I didn’t, because I thought it was kind of obvious that there would be other factors than gun prevalence that affect suicide rates. That was my mistake, because you seem to be taking it as read that I think the only reason suicide rates might vary is because more or fewer people have access to guns. What a fucking idiot you must have thought me.
Having cleared that up, I note that closer examination of your 1990-2014 time frame shows that the increase in suicide rates has happened post 2006, and is driven by big increases in the suicide rate for white men, those aged 15-64 and those living in more rural areas. You will know better than me what issues are affecting that group, but I would have thought that a great recession, slow recovery, the collapse of industries such as coal-mining, and a massive opioid epidemic might be likely to have an effect. Although I can’t right now find direct stats on the proportion of firearm to non-firearm suicides, I’d note that this group (rural white men) are more likely than average to own guns, so I think we have to consider that a national decline in access to firearms doesn’t imply a decline in such access among the group that sadly appears to be most likely to kill themselves.
This is a complete red herring though. It may very well be that when comparing the suicide rates of Finns and Americans, the critical factor is Finnish culture rather than gun ownership. But what’s proposed is American-specific gun control. The culture can be taken as a given - at which point the access to guns looms much larger as a contributing factor. The question has to be: “What would happen to suicides rates in America if Americans had less access to guns?”. What is driving other countries suicide rates is utterly beside the point.
Again - firstly, there are other factors for which epidemiological papers can control and real life cannot and secondly, it may not in fact be a coincidence that suicide rates have risen fastest among those with access to guns, and not risen or risen more slowly among those who have become less likely to own guns.
“Eventually” is doing a lot of work here. The various coal gas in the UK/ pesticides in South Pacific studies show that at worst the suicide rate slowly returns to where it was. If people were going to “eventually” kill themselves n years later then suicide rates would have shot up higher than the long-term rate due to e.g. everyone who would have killed themselves in 1968 doing so plus everyone who didn’t put their head in an oven in 1965 finally realising that bridges exist. That’s not what happened. Either those people who didn’t kill themselves in 1965 just didn’t kill themselves ever or the people who would have used an oven in 1968 couldn’t find an alternative. In any case, the net effect was to save lives.
Also, it would be OK to work towards a short-term goal of taking away a quick, painless, effective means of committing suicde AND to improve e.g. mental health services for the long-term! These are not either-or options.
It’s fine if that’s the goal you want to work towards, but it’s not really on point for this thread because “taking away” law abiding citizens’ guns imposes a substantial burden on them rather than minimizing it.
Well, I thought it was pretty obvious too, which is why I don’t directly correlate gun ownership or even access to suicide rate. I never said there was no link (how fucking stupid you must think I am on this, right?)…I just don’t think there is a causal link. Certainly there are a lot of factors in play with respect to suicide. My point is that I don’t think taking away guns, even magically (i.e. positing unrealistic ban methods) will have anything like a 1 for 1 correlation. If we removed ALL the guns then we wouldn’t, magically, save those 19K people who die by committing suicide by firearm on average. We’d save, maybe, a percentage of them, for maybe a few years or maybe a decade. Eventually, IMHO, the numbers would rebalance back to something like what they were, just the methods would be different.
In reality, since we can’t just magic the guns away, I think that even that is sketchy. There are, literally, more guns in the US than there are people. Even though the number of households having a gun is down, it’s still close to 50% of US households that have one, which means that they will still be widely available for things like suicide, regardless. Someone planning on committing suicide is probably not going to worry overly much if the thing they are planning to use is banned or illegal, after all.
Absolutely. And all those factors DO have causal links to suicide. You are talking about one method used in a country that favors that method culturally. The things you mention here are actual factors that could be addressed.
I don’t think it’s a red herring at all. I think it demonstrates something important about suicide and decouples it from the method. Finn’s culturally use other methods to commit suicide that, presumably, don’t generally involve guns. The US, with our ‘gun culture’ does. The method, to me, does’t make suicide more or less prevalent on the macro scale…countries, especially large and modern countries are going to have a certain level of suicide per 100K regardless of the method preferred, culturally, by their citizens. Taking away a method might, in the short term, change that, but eventually things will rebalance to the norm.
Sorry you don’t see it that way, but I’m used to people who on one had love to compare the US to other countries when it suits them but can’t see why we would compare it on others. Generally, I’m more in the don’t compare camp, but I think suicide is a basic human condition, but that different cultures and societies think about it differently, especially with respect to the method.
Or it may be a coincidence, or there may be other factors (such as white males feeling increasingly under pressure due to the economy or various other things, blue collar manufacturing collapse wrt workers, or myriad other factors). I haven’t seen any compelling evidence presented showing a direct link. What I’ve seen is some data that MIGHT show such a link, contradicted by other data that doesn’t or shows the opposite. Granted, I haven’t looked deeply into this in a while. If you feel you have something compelling, feel free to show it. Apparently hijacking this thread on this tangent is ok, even though this doesn’t have much to do with the OP.
Sure, in theory and depending on a good cost to benefit. Let’s say you are right, and there is more than a weak link. Guns are a major factor in US suicide. Eliminating guns would reduce, on a 1 for 1 basis, suicides by firearm. Great. But we are talking about only 19,000 people, roughly, a year. That SOUNDS like a lot, but really it isn’t. But every life is precious, right? So, that’s the benefit. What’s the cost though? The American people are divided on this issue. Many on this board are more on the gun ban or heavy restriction side, but this board is not representative of the majority view in the country. So, to do it would take first the political will, then some fairly draconian measures if you REALLY wanted to get those guns out of people’s hands. We are talking a lot of guns.
I don’t see the cost to benefit, to be honest. Even if we could save all 19,000 people, which, frankly, is fantasy, the cost would be very high to our society to try and do it at this time. Impossible, really. You need a sea change in public opinion on this, with a large majority supporting heavy restrictions or outright bans, probably supporting a change to our 2nd Amendment to really make it happen. Here’s the thing though…if you got that you would already most likely have started to alleviate the suicide by gun issue, at least according to your own logic. People who are good with the government banning or restricting their guns probably aren’t going to have guns in their house anyway. If the vast majority of citizens did change on this, you’d almost certainly already have the situation where fewer and fewer households have guns (we see this trend happening already, in fact).
Sure, which is why my suggestion for this thread was to follow the recommendation the CDC be allowed to collect voluntary data on firearm prevalence and use. A very small impact (indeed, none at all if you don’t care to volunteer info) with the potential to at least ground some aspects of this debate in actual data. Who could object to that?
No one has made the claim that "
*there cannot possibly be a link between suicide rates and gun prevalence" *There can be, and likely is. It’s just that it’s clear that cultural factors appear to affect suicide rates far more than the availability and use of firearms. And I want to point out that posting that people have made a statement that they havent is setting a up a strawman- not to mention other issues, and is definitely poor debating and rude.
Nor has anyone claimed that "no material benefit would be gained from reduced gun prevalence ". Of course, when we give up our rights, we can get some small measure of “benefit”. We could reduce crime materially by taking away 5th ad rights also. We could reduce terrorism, suicide and mass shootings by taking away the 1st Ad. Of course, the gun grabbers, as they hate and fear guns, will happily trade other citizens rights to guns away to make the gun grabbers feel safer.
As Ben said “*Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
*
Oddly, we have continually made the same point, that just because Gun Control seems to work in small Western European nations, those who have never had a higher murder rate or high gun ownership, it doesnt mean it will work in the USA.
And anyone who thinks that a correlation means a causation doesnt understand science or logic.
They are allowed to. It is totally false that the CDC cant do firearm studies. They certainly can. However, after the backed a couple of biased studies, whose results were designed ahead of time, and used a incorrect method study, the CDC has been banned from “advocating or promoting gun control.” Before that classic, biased and flawed study, CDC official and research head Patrick O’Carroll openly stated "“We’re going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths.” That is the opposite of how science is supposed to work. You dont start with the conclusion.
In fact the CDC has done quite a few studies about gun violence recently.
Next, you mention epidemiological studies several times. Guns and suicides are social and/or criminal issues, not epidemic issues. No germs are involved. The use of epidemiological studies for gun control is a red herring and has been condemned by the actual experts- criminologists.
It seems like the number of suicides would be pretty much the same regardless of whether there were guns or not. Not having a gun nearby would probably reduce the number of “spur of the moment” attempts, where something happens in the moment that makes someone so despondent they commit suicide (e.g catching their spouse in bed having an affair). But I would guess that’s just a small amount of cases. For anyone who is deeply suicidal, it doesn’t seem like lack of access to a gun would really change the outcome all that much. One other place that lack of guns would help would be in suicides where someone wants to make a public statement. There was a case recently of a student who brought a shotgun to school to commit suicide. Without guns, I don’t think the person would try in public. They might do it in a more private way, or not do it at all. But these are probably just a very small amount as well. When considering the huge amount of effort it would take to ensure guns couldn’t be used for suicide, a much better use of that effort would be to help people not consider suicide in the first place.
If there are small metal parts that can’t be made at home (and I’m not talking about home 3D printing currently, but what might be available a decade from now, long before the half-billion guns already in the U.S. could be significantly reduced by any legally plausible means), I’m confident internet entrepreneurs will be happy to supply them with wink-wink warnings that say “don’t use this for this purpose.”
Pass laws that make law abiding gun owners into felons. Then you don’t have to worry about inconveniencing them.