USA leads the world in gun suicides

American statistics comparable with those from nations in chaos

More than 250,000 people were killed by guns in 2016, not including deaths from conflicts, terrorism or law enforcement, according to a comprehensive global report published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Six countries in the Americas – Brazil, the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Guatemala – accounted for half the 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.

“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.”

University of Washington researchers looked at firearms-related fatalities from 1990 to 2016. One of the report’s recommendations for preventing suicides is 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, while less than 10 percent of the attempts relying on ingesting pills or slashing wrists will succeed, according to a JAMA editorial in November 2017.

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 United States – which boasts the world’s largest economy and a stable democracy – finds itself among the leaders in gun violence alongside nations enduring political and economic turmoil, such as Venezuela and Brazil. The latter topped the charts for firearm-related deaths with 43,200 in 2016, or 5,000 more than the USA.