Study shows USA leading world in gun-related suicides

Experts see tie-in with accessibility to firearms

Sunday’s shooting at a video game tournament in Jacksonville, Florida, once again trained a spotlight on the problems of gun violence and mental health in the USA, while the matter of the suspect killing himself got secondary billing.

But a new study underscores how serious an issue gun suicide has become.

The comprehensive global report, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at firearm-related fatalities from 1990-2016. University of Washington researchers found that more than 250,000 people were killed by guns in 2016, not including deaths from conflicts, terrorism or law enforcement activities.

Six countries in the Americas – Brazil, the USA, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Guatemala – accounted for half those deaths.

Although the USA ranked fourth in the world with 12,400 firearm-related homicides, that figure pales in comparison with its 23,800 gun suicides. None of the other 194 nations and territories in the report came close; India ranked second at 13,400.

Except for Greenland, which had 11 total suicides through use of a firearm, the USA had the world’s highest rate of such deaths with 6.4 per 100,000 people.

“Gun suicides continue to be kind of an underreported story in the sense that when people think of gun violence, they think of homicides, they think of gangs or mass shooters or personal violence,” said Robert Spitzer, author of five books on gun policy. “But the firearm-suicide fatality rate is a large number and a public health problem.”

Spitzer is among several experts who point to a strong correlation between suicide and easy access to guns.

In the case of David Katz, whom police identified as the shooter who killed two persons and wounded 10 before taking his own life in the Jacksonville incident, reports indicate he bought two weapons legally despite having a history of mental illness.

In June, a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said suicide rates climbed in almost every state. Suicide was one of three of the 10 leading causes of death that were rising.

One of the report’s top recommendations for preventing suicides was reducing access to firearms, which were used in 53 percent of the cases in 2016. Statistics show nine out of 10 suicide attempts using a gun are lethal, whereas less than 10 percent of the attempts relying on ingesting pills or slashing wrists will succeed, according to a JAMA editorial in November 2017.

Estimates of the number of weapons in the USA vary. A study released in June by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva calculated the number of guns in this country at 393 million, or 40 percent of the arms in the world.

“When people who have guns around the house are depressed and then they have suicidal impulses and there’s easy access to a lethal means, that’s how you get (those results),” said Chris Murray, one of the senior authors of the UW study.

The report said the number of firearm-related deaths worldwide rose from 209,000 in 1990 to 251,000 in 2016, while the rate of about four per 100,000 dipped slightly.

Murray said some of the measures that have been effective in curbing gun violence in other countries included more restricted access to firearms and buy-back programs.

“The firearm-suicide fatality rate is a large number and a public health problem.” Robert Spitzer Author of five books on gun policy