Nation wide 22 vets commit suicide every day on average.
Nation wide 129 people commit suicide every day on average.
These are obviously terrible stats, but when we look at “percent of population”, are vets killing themselves actually at a higher rate than the civilian population?
And this might be hard to determine, but how often is the fact that a suicide victim was a veteran, play a role in their death?
When you break out the general population rate by gender and age cohort the the general and veteran rates are pretty close, with veterans maybe still slightly higher depending on data sources.
There are probably also other selection biases for veterans, who are not drawn from a representative cross section of the general population.
Guns are associated with increased suicide because suicide attempts are often impulsive decisions and impulsive decisions made with guns tend to have immediate, severe and permanent consequences.
After adjusting for age female vets have a suicide rate at 2 times that of non veteran females.
Without adjusting age distribution it’s 8x higher.
Lest we rely on gun ownership as any sort of indicator, female veterans and female non veterans own guns at the same rate. The aforementioned association in civilian population is dependant on race, gender,location,age, and year, it can have a positive, inverse or no correlation, depending who,when, and where you look specifically.
For males that number is 1.3x non veterans
Without adjusting age it’s 1.5 times higher.
Age distribution adjustment introduces some flaws in this case because among veterans rates are highest in the 18-35 age group at 40.4/100k while in non veteran populations 45+ is highest.
So age adjustment cuts off a huge portion of veteran population that happens to have the highest rate by far.
18-35 age group in overall population is about 14/100k.