Hindsight from The New Gun Week November 10, 1999
Suicide by Gun Now in the News
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
The electronic and print media has given broad coverage recently to another huge reduction in the number of homicides in the United States, particularly homicide by handgun.Their glowing reports are based on the latest statistics issued by the FBI which show that homicides in 1998 dropped again, the seventh decrease in as many years. The reports are eager to point out that homicides committed with handguns-like all homicides-seem to be a healthy part of the whole trend.
Notoriously anti-gun politicians and their many supporters are quick to claim that the Brady Act and other anti-crime initiatives sponsored by the Clinton-Gore Administration are the principal reason for the declines. Indeed, they claim that the reductions correlate to the terms of the current Administration.
More serious scholars than President Clinton are not as quick to give the restrictive new gun laws much credit. They point to other societal changes during the past seven or eight years, which have little to do with who sits in the White House.
Other Factors
Criminologists and sociologists credit many other factors for the decline in homicides as well as most other categories of serious crime. Among those most often cited are: aging of the overall population which is linked to a big drop in the number of people in the most crime-prone youthful age-group; a healthy economy with a high employment rate, even in entry-level positions, and a reduction in the number using crack cocaine and other such illegal drugs.I tend to agree with the latter group because it seems that crime and homicide rates have varied during this century, and have often been lower when guns were more readily available, both in stores and in the number of households. Without being a social scientist, it is apparent that gun availability and gun laws have little, if anything, to do with the level of serious crime.
This doesn't help those who have been using crime statistics as the excuse for their plan to disarm law-abiding Americans in this country and abroad. (Significantly, violent crime in Australia went up after the massive buy-up of registered firearms by that nation's government.)
But guns aren't the only tool of the murderer, nor the only avenue for the suicide. In fact, many countries that have very restrictive gun laws have both higher suicide and murder rates than the US. (Check UN Yearbooks and other sources.)
I mention the suicide factor-which the anti-gunners always include to create their meaningless "gun death" total-because it, too, is making the news.
NY Times Article
The New York Times-America's newspaper of record or biggest bell-cow for journalists-ran a story by reporter Fox Butterfield related to suicides and guns on Oct. 17. The headline proclaimed that guns were now used in more suicides than homicides. It suggested that as violent crime rates dropped, people-particularly social engineers-were focusing their attention on suicide."With the homicide rate down sharply since the early 1990s," The Times article began, the number of Americans who commit suicide with guns each year now far surpasses those who are killed by others with firearms, government statistics show.
"In 1997, the last year for which there are statistics available, guns were used in 17,566 suicides, compared with 13,522 homicides, according to the National Vital Statistics Report," The Times continued.
"This differential is helping focus new attention on suicide, a subject that has long been taboo for many Americans and whose toll was partly hidden from view by the violent crime wave of the 1980s."
The Times reported that a Senate committee was scheduled to hold the first ever Congressional hearings on suicide in late October, news that was followed up the following week by the major television networks. They said that Dr. David Satcher, the US surgeon general, had recently made preventing suicide one of his priorities, the first time a surgeon general has put suicide so prominently on the public health agenda. Some of the reports claimed that Satcher said that suicides had reached epidemic proportions and had become a major public health issue.
According to The Times report, a new book by a best-selling writer, Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, provides a comprehensive and authoritative look at the subject, which mental health advocates hope will have a major impact on public thinking about suicide.
Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, concludes that 90 to 95% of people who commit suicide had a diagnosable psychiatric illness and that the number of young people who kill themselves in the US has tripled since the 1950s. She found that 60% of the 30,000 Americans who on average take their own lives each year do so with guns, which works out to about 18,000 a year.
By comparison, The Times said there were a total of 16,914 homicides in the US in 1998, according to the Justice Department.
"Suicide is a public health tragedy, said Jamison, who was the writer of an earlier book, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, an account of her own struggle with manic-depressive illness and suicide attempts. "You don't hear the outrage about suicide" that is voiced about crime, she said, "because I think families have been so stigmatized and reluctant to talk about it."
Gun in Home
In her new book, Jamison cites a series of studies in recent years showing that having a gun in the home increases the risk of suicide. "For young people in particular, who have a very impulsive element to their suicide, having access to a means of suicide that is quick and irrevocable like a gun is an unnecessary risk," she said.If at this point, you join me in anticipating a whole new theme to the continuing assault on our constitutional gun right, I'm not surprised. The Times quoted other sources to bolster the argument that having guns in the home might make suicide easier. They don't discuss the suicide rate in Japan, for instance, or Sweden, Great Britain, Canada and other almost gunless countries.
Totally ignoring international statistics to the contrary, The Times continued:
"Laurie Flynn, the executive director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, which is made up of relatives of the emotionally disturbed, said the easy access to guns in the United States had compounded the suicide problem, especially as states have dismantled their treatment system for the mentally ill and health insurers have made it increasingly difficult for the emotionally troubled to get treatment.
"It is easier and cheaper to get a gun and kill yourself than to get treatment," Flynn said.
According to The Times article, "One recent study that looked at all people who legally bought handguns in California in 1991 found that their risk of gun suicides in the first week after purchase was more than 50 times higher than for the population of the state as a whole.
Anti-Gun Researcher
"The risk of committing suicide with a gun remained at least twice as high for the handgun purchasers as for the general population of California during the next five years, said Dr. Garen Wintemute, who presented a paper on the study at a 1998 meeting of the American Public Health Association."Wintemute is an emergency room physician and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California at Davis, from which vantage point he has conducted a steady stream of studies designed to show that people should not have guns.
The Senate hearings were to be held before the Labor, Health and Human Services subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee and were arranged by Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV). Reid had been interested in the issues of suicide and mental illness since his father, Harry, a miner in the small desert town of Searchlight, NV, shot himself to death in 1972 after suffering from depression.
The Times added more grist to the mill with some additional statistics from the National Vital Statistics Report, which is published by the National Center for Health Statistics in Washington.
Suicide may be the public health issues that Satcher and others claim it is. Certainly it is tragic. However, I wonder if anyone will testify on the government policy of recent years which forces people in mental health facilities to be turned to the streets rather than be given proper care by professionals.
I wonder, too, about the mathematics of the research we will be seeing soon. If gun laws to reduce the availability of firearms have really reduced homicides, they should also have reduced the number of suicides.
The New Gun Week is published three times a month by the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) on the 1st, 10th, and 20th. Hindsight is a commentary written by SAF President and Gun Week Executive Editor Joseph P. Tartaro. This commentary may be reprinted so long as credit is given to the author and the publication. For more information or to subscribe, write Gun Week, PO Box 488, Buffalo, NY 14209, or call 716-885-6408 Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST, or inquire on Compuserve to John Krull, Production manager-JohnSAF@Compuserve.com or gunweeksaf@broadviewnet.netAlso, check out the New Gun Week at http://www.GunWeek.com