Men’s Rights activists like to remind people that men commit suicide far more often than women.
But that’s not because men are many times more miserable than women. In fact, women are far more likely to attempt suicide than men. They simply don’t succeed at it as often as men do.
The reason for this is simple: men tend to choose more lethal methods of suicide than women. And that often means guns. Indeed, most gun deaths in the US are the result of suicide, not murder.
Could we reduce the number of suicides by making guns harder to get hold of? A new study in the American Journal of Public Health suggests the answer is yes.
Researchers Michael D. Anestis and Joye C. Anestis from the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg looked at the effect four different kinds of gun control legislation — waiting periods, universal background checks, gun locks, and open carrying regulations — had on suicide rates, finding that
[e]ach law was associated with significantly lower firearm suicide rates and the proportion of suicides resulting from firearms. In addition, each law, except for that which required a waiting period, was associated with a lower overall suicide rate. Follow-up analyses showed a significant indirect effect on overall suicide rates through the proportion of suicides by firearms, indicating that the reduced overall suicide rate was attributable to fewer suicide attempts, fewer handguns in the home, suicide attempts using less lethal means, or a combination of these factors. States that implemented any of these laws saw a decreased suicide rate in subsequent years, whereas the only state that repealed 1 of these laws saw an increased suicide rate.
This isn’t the only study suggesting that restricting access to firearms could dramatically lower suicide rates.
A 2013 study by researchers Justin Briggs and Alex Tabarrok at George Mason University found that in the United States from 2000 to 2009, each “percentage-point decrease in household gun ownership leads to between 0.5 and 0.9 percent fewer suicides.”
And the effect has been seen in other countries as well. Australia saw an 80 percent reduction in suicides by firearm after adopting stricter gun control laws and instituting a large-scale gun buyback program in the 1990s; there was no rise in suicides by other means.
This last finding may strike some as the most puzzling one. If someone is intent on killing themselves but no longer has a firearm in the house, wouldn’t they just attempt suicide in some other way? Surprisingly the answer is generally “no.”
As Briggs and Tabarrok noted in a Slate piece explaining their findings,
contrary to the “folk wisdom” that people who want to commit suicide will always find a way to get the job done, suicides are not inevitable. Suicides are often impulsive decisions, and guns require less forethought than other means of suicide—and they’re also deadlier.
MRAs who are serious about reducing the number of male suicides — not just using male suicide stats as a cheap debating point — need to start talking seriously about gun control.
Here’s a video from VOX with more information on the subject:
@anikom
“This is false causation. While restricting firearms may reduce suicide rates, there is no evidence that it will reduce the differential between the sexes. I believe the difference is wholly cultural and that a better (and more realistic) course of action is a reëvaluation of dealing with mental illness”
Not at all false causation. It’s the wrong question. In my earlier point, I say that gun control doesn’t seem to help with the differential in rates between male and female suicide, but there is plenty of evidence that it reduces suicide overall and would have a particular impact on the number of male suicides.
If the problem is only that men are killing themselves more than women – then we can solve THAT problem by somehow encouraging women to kill themselves more. Since women seem to like pills to kill themselves, we could sell more effective, quick-acting suicide pills ONLY to women. But I’m sure that you can see that would have its own limitations as a policy.
If the overall policy aim is fewer suicides – and I think that’s probably the one we really want to go for, then gun control in the US would be an effective method of reducing suicide rates overall and in particular for men. MORE men would be alive as a result of this policy than women. And if you are an ‘advocate for men’ then this would be a good thing to advocate for.
But this should not be the only policy to deal with suicide, either for men or women. And certainly, better mental health services and better crisis intervention services (sometimes people ‘live with suicide’ as in the comment above and sometimes it’s an impulsive act for people who would normally describe themselves as mentally well, but in a tough situation). Rarely is there a single policy solution to a complex problem. Of course, the benefit of this policy is that it would not just reduce suicides in the US, but homicides and accidental deaths as well. It’s a win, win, win. Would it solve the suicide problem or murder or accidental death? No, of course not. But human lives would be saved at a lower cost than almost any other designable intervention.
Tessa
I don’t quite get that either. I was born in the 90’s.
I’m not much of a reader since I have ADHD, what helps me is to write down a summary of each chapter and write down the characters. I mostly like comics because of the pictures it’s easier to follow along.
@Fruitloopsie
Signed, signed, and signed. Thanks!
Cameron Post is a YA novel, so its intended audience was born well after it ends. So it’s historical because it portrays a time period that they can only know through books and movies, rather than through their own memory, as opposed to contemporary novels, which reflect their actual lived reality. Same with Aristotle and Dante. The cutoff for historical would be different if the audience were older.
@megpie17
I recognize this so much. Thanks for sharing.
My mental state used to be much worse than it is now. At one point I was moving to a different city for school, and I remember actually googling “tall buildings in [city]” because I had decided the best way for me to do it would be to jump off a building. Google said it was a remarkably flat city, so I just gave up.
Katz: “Historical” is too loaded and makes me feel old. So *raspberry*. Well, since you went and gave a serious response to a throwaway jokey comment, I’ll just have to respond seriously. The book ends in ’93. I’d hardly call 5 or 6 years “well before”. And it doesn’t exactly address things so different from what can happen today, it’s about a gay away camp. There’s another book written not long after Cameron Post set “today” about a gay away camp. To be truly “historical” there needs to be much more of an offset from the lives of the readers. It’s a far cry from something like Wildthorn.
Isn’t it amazing how both Anikom and flint post comments claiming that restictions on gun ownership would not have speciifc effects (reducing the gender difference in Anikom’s case, overall suicides in flint’s) while completely ignoring the hard evidence to the contrary cited in the OP. One might almost think they had an emotional attachment to guns which distorted their ability to process evidence rationally.
The case of Japan has already been dealt with (a long tradition of suicide as an honourable act). While it’s certainly true that France has a lot fewer guns in private hands than the USA, it also has both a high rate of private gun ownership, and a high rate of gun suicide. The evidence cited in the OP suggests that if the French government wants to reduce overall suicide rates, restricting gun ownership would be helpful.
So how do you explain the rate still being significantly higher in the U.K.where I’m pretty sure you can’t walk into Sainsburys and buy a shooter?
@the bitterest pill:
Here are three hypotheses. Alas, medical ethics and lack of time machines prevent me from falsifying them.
1) The UK has a more overtly consumerist society than France does with a smaller social support system, which correlates with a higher suicide rate.
2) The UK was hit harder by the Great Recession than France was, a factor which is known to have contributed to suicides either directly or via divorce or bankruptcy.
3) The UK is further north than France is, a factor which correlates extremely strongly with suicides.
@ Pandapool
The chap who came up with that idea was one Thomas Midgley. He was a chemist. Some other examples of his inventions were Freon to go in fridges and CFCs to go in aerosols.
No doubt a nice chap but apparently responsible for more deaths than Hitler.
He contracted polio and used his fantastic technical skills to devise a pulley system to get him in and out of bed. It strangled him to death.
@ contrapangloss
I’d forgotten you were an ambulance person. One thing I sued to do was seminars for ambulance crews. Mainly about issues of consent.
A common problem they had was whether they should treat someone who refused help (and risk assault charges) or leave them be (and risk manslaughter charges if they subsequently died).
There were two common scenarios. They would often attend the aftermath of fights and the like. There’d be some guy with a gaping head wound shouting “Fuck off and leave me alone” before trying to stagger away.
The other common scenario was attending people who had taken pills in order to commit suicide.
My standard advice was that there wasn’t a court in the land that would actually convict a medic who’d saved someone’s life, even against their will.
Even if they were articulating their desire to die, the crews could not rule out that the person’s thinking wasn’t disordered, either as a result of shock of an injury or because of a mental health issue.
With regards to suicide attempts the courts take the view that even if a person who has made a rational decision to die is frustrated in that attempt they can always have another go, so there’s no real harm in intervening.
It’s an interesting topic though; do you get any training on this?
It’s a neat trick often employed by the gun wankers (thanks, Bina!). If regulating guns more strictly won’t get rid of all crime/end all suicide, then what’s the point? It’s a way to try and get the pro gun control to start making the perfect the enemy of the good.
At least now no red-herring-loving MRAs can accuse us of not caring about men’s issues.
Though I’m sure they’ll find some way to twist this into an attack on masculinity or something.
@EJ @Alan @Anyone else who might know:
The UK also seems on the face of it to have more of a culture of binge drinking (in the clinical sense) than does France.
Do you know off hand if that holds up statistically?
If so, I could see that also being a factor.
(I’m taking a breather between setting up a tree nursery and taking a shower so that I’m not a disgusting, sweaty, dirty mess for a dental appointment or I’d dig into the info myself.)
It’s definitely true that the UK has more binge drinking than France, especially amongst men; I don’t know whether it contributes to suicide, but it is considered to be a contributing factor to assault, rape and accidental death rates.
There are a few factors affecting baby boomers that don’t/didn’t affect previous and subsequent generations.
1. The threat of nuclear war – annihilation. We’re the ones who learned to duck under desks in school and to cover ourselves with picnic rugs if we happened to be inside or outside when we saw that ominous flash.
2. Civil rights era from mid-50s onwards.
3. The nuclear threat was still current when the US and allies entered the Vietnam War. And some US military leaders seriously proposed using nuclear weapons during that war.
Our childhoods were affected by an unusual, chronic fear which has since receded to a large extent. (More because nobody makes those daft protect yourself films or runs those silly pointless drills than for any other reason. Nuclear weapons are no less dangerous now than they were when we were at school. People just don’t talk about them the same way.)
The Vietnam war sucked all the we-win-all-the-time optimism out of populations who tended to feel a bit satisfied, if not proud of themselves, on having won two world wars. All that carnage, all those deaths, for nothing. And, for the first time, the Vietnam war was played out on television rather than on the occasional newsreels of WW2. That made a big difference.
My views might be a bit affected by the fact that I’ve recently watched a few documentaries on the history of modern music and on the sixties generally. If you listen carefully to lyrics and take note of the time the songs were written or became popular, you can see the shift in emphasis from anti-nuclear bravado/despair merging into general anti-war protest songs. Some of them pretty despairing – like this one. Sounds fast and cheery, follow the bouncing ball to read the lyrics if you don’t know it. Not so cheery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W7-ngmO_p8
I presume professional academic sociologists might have come up with some real analysis on the question. I just happen to have watched, today, an episode of The Sixties – The Years That Shaped a Generation . It includes the March on Washington, a whole lot of deaths of civil rights activists ending with the death of Martin Luther King. Made me cry. Again.
So my perspective is, just maybe, a bit off at the moment.
@ mockingbird
Ooh, dunno. It’s difficult to assess the true incidence of binge drinking. It’s something that’s often a topic in the ‘red top’ newspapers, and certainly there are some city centres where it’s a feature.
However the demographics most associated with binge drinking correlate with the least likely people to commit suicide. Also, the biggest factor identified with suicide here is perceived friendlessness and loneliness, whether real or imagined. Say what you like about binge drinking but it’s a social activity. When alcohol does play a part in suicide it’s more likely to be the older person who stays at home and engages in solitary drinking.
There seems to be a bit of a correlation with hard drug use and suicide. It may be though that someone with access to opiates has an easy way to kill themselves, to go back to the idea that it’s availability and ease of method that’s the key thing.
When looking at suicide rates in Western Europe it’s probably worth remembering that the rates, sad as they are, are quite low so we need to be cautious seeking statistical trends. Suicide seems to cluster and there’s no obvious causes as to why one area may have a higher incidence than average and another area lower. So if you looked at Western Europe as a whole it may be the regional differences are inconsequential.
“I hate to be that guy…” Okay,
A- that guy who what? Doesn’t read the fucking OP before wanking off in the comment section?
And, B- bullshit, I’ll bet you fucking love to “be that guy.”
Ugh, the “overmedicated” myth made it into one of those posts. ADHD is a real thing that was under-diagnosed in the past, its effects on brain chemistry are very well understood, and medicine HELPS. You can manage it without medicine in some cases, but not always.
As a “gifted” woman, which makes me doubly less likely to have been diagnosed (on the flip side very gifted men are probably the ONLY population where over-medication might be a problem, but of course everybody thinks their child is very gifted), who wasn’t diagnosed until after college, and whose parents just assumed I was lazy this whole time…ugh.
In short: Boys aren’t overmedicated. Girls are under diagnosed. Or might actually get ADHD less often, but it looks like a lot of the gap comes from social/cultural bias.
Re:Alan
I’d argue that the correlation between hard drug use and suicide is probably largely attributable to the fact that happy cheery people don’t usually end up abusing heroin.
Every drug addict started using for a reason, and they continue using for a reason, and those reasons are pretty much never “they’re morally degenerate” or “they’re weak willed.” Usually it’s something more along the lines of “I feel like my life is shit”.
I think that I’ve mentioned before that the main factor driving suicide is a personality trait of impulsiviness. They’ve done studies of people with depression, and found that a history of impulsive decisions explained the people who committed suicide verses the people who stayed alive. Anything that reduces impulsiveness helps. Gun control will (temporarily) reduce suicide, but I think a much healthier, permanent solution would be for society to change its attitudes towards suicide and begin discussing suicide openly.
I admit, I’m not for most forms of gun control. I think the only for of weapon (not just gun) cintrol the government
It is a cheap debating point when it’s only brought up to attempt to silence people who are speaking out against them, or to score some kind of points in a self-made debate, and they do nothing about said talking point.
Time and time again, this point, as real and relevant as it is, is only used by MRAs as a way to try to silence feminists by claiming they don’t care about men or boys committing suicide. The only time it’s brought up is when feminists claim that men have more privilege, and it’s one of their many go-to “gotchas”.
@ Binjabreel
Yeah, I’d agree that’s likely to be a significant factor. Already unhappy people + easy opportunity to overdose is going to make suicide more likely.
@ Mrrex
It would be interesting to look at the suicide rates for anabolic steroid users. One of the main effects of these drugs is an inhibition in impulse control. Wonder if that manifests itself in higher suicide rates?