In U.S.A., more than 50% of the suicides were committed with firearms in 2010 (source: Center for Disease Control – CDC), which is the 10th leading cause of death. Intuitively, you would think that if people who wish to commit suicide do not have access to their desired method of offing themselves, they will find alternatives, right? Wrong.
Anestis et al. (2015) wondered whether passing stricter gun legislature (such as requirements to have a permit to purchase a handgun, a registration of handguns, or/and a license to own a handgun) has any impact in the suicide rates. These three laws have been chosen because these are the only ones tracked by the National Rifle Association (NRA) Institute for Legislative Action and the authors din not want to be accused of being “biased toward the regulation of handguns” (p. e2). They looked at publicly available databases regarding suicide rates and demographics (e.g. CDC) and legislature (statal publications) for 2010. Then they SPSS-ed the hell out of the data, i.e. conducted a lot of statistics.
In a nutshell, the results show that the states with any of these three laws in place had fewer suicide rates. The authors would have looked at more laws, like the waiting time required to purchase the gun (which the authors believe would also influence the suicide rates) but, as they said, they analyzed only what NRA tracks so they are not accused of biases.
Reference: Anestis, M. D., Khazem, L. R., Law, K. C., Houtsma, C., LeTard, R., Moberg, F., Martin, R. (October 2015, Epub 16 Apr 2015). The Association Between State Laws Regulating Handgun Ownership and Statewide Suicide Rates. American Journal of Public Health, 105(10): 2059-2067. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2014.302465. Article | Full text PDF via Research Gate
By Neuronicus, 3 October 2015
The Science Portal 