Friday, February 15, 2013

More evidence for the irrationality of the gun debate

I wrote the following before I saw today's NY Times editorial which pretty much mirrors my post below. Here is the Times link.

The New York Times reported yesterday that having guns in your home makes your home more dangerous. It's pretty straightforward evidence. If you are a male suffering from long-term or short-term depression and there is a firearm in your house, you are at much greater risk of turning that firearm on yourself to commit suicide.  In fact, suicide attempts with pills are about 2% successful. Suicide attempts with guns are about 85% successful. The differences are that stark. Now, of course, most people are not desperate enough to resort to suicide, but if their depressed feelings take a sudden turn for the worse for whatever reason and a gun is available, death is much more likely because of the availability of that gun.

Some people say, reflecting on the tragic circumstances of a family suicide, that if a gun had not been available, then the victim would have found another way to hurt himself. Which appears to be true. What is also unassailably true is that they are much less likely to be successful in killing themselves if a gun is not available.

But gun owners remain unconvinced. Why? Because they love their guns beyond all reason and I suppose they also doubt that in their own individual case they are jeopardizing their safety. The evidence suggests they are terribly wrong. Firearms are used in almost 60% of male suicides and part of the reason for the high incidence of suicide in these cases is that unlike, say, suffocation through hanging (another fairly common means for committing suicide), guns can be used quickly and impulsively. At the very least, it follows that if you must keep guns in your home, the prudent thing to do is to keep them locked up. Of course, if they're locked up, then they won't be available when you need to fight off an assailant. But as we know, the likelihood of successfully using a gun to repel a criminal is so tiny as to be non-existent. Maybe we can't legislate against all guns, but we should launch a major public health campaign about making guns in the home as inaccessible as possible.

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