'Weaker' Gun Laws Continue to be Blamed for Suicides

Bearing Arms was the child of Bob Owens. Every single one of us owes the man something, and I never actually met him. Still, one of the best compliments I got in my early days here was someone saying I was a worthy successor to his legacy. I don't feel that way at all. I'm just trying to do the best I can, but I appreciate it just the same.

Bob took his own life, and the anti-gunners had a field day with that fact. To them, it was the vindication of everything they believed. A staunch Second Amendment advocate takes his own life with a gun? Oh, it was just too good for them.

And lately, it seems that anti-gunners are pushing the idea that gun rights mean more gun suicides. We've seen numerous reports focusing on suicides, and sure enough, we have another one that claims weak gun laws lead to more suicides with a firearm.

The numbers upend a familiar narrative. While stronger gun laws are linked to fewer firearm deaths overall, the real story lies in the details: suicide rates drop far more sharply than homicides. This research challenges blanket policy approaches and demands a more tailored response to two very different crises.

A new research letter offers a different take on the now-time-worn Pavlovian-like debate over state gun laws and firearm-related deaths. The analysis is based on crude firearm death rates from the CDC, census data, and a scoring of the strength of state gun laws. The scoring system was developed by the Gifford Law Center, an organization founded by a victim of firearms violence, Congresswoman Gabby Gifford.

In 2022, firearms caused 48,204 deaths in the US, and as expected, stronger gun laws correlated with decreasing firearm death rates—stronger gun laws, fewer firearm deaths.

The researchers then differentiated firearm-related deaths as homicides or suicides, and here is where the narrative shifts dramatically. Stronger gun laws showed a significantly stronger correlation for reduced suicides compared to homicides. 

Using the R² value, a statistical measure of how well a model explains the data, stronger gun laws had R² values of 0.6 to 0.7 for suicides, and only 0.1 or slightly greater for homicides. In the graphic, which shows the trend for stronger gun laws and all deaths, the R² value reflects how closely the data points cluster next to the trend line. 

Now, one of the big problems with this study is that it looks purely at "gun deaths," meaning any death that was the result of a gunshot wound.

It doesn't compare suicide rates as a whole, which may or may not support the link between gun laws and suicides as a whole, only suicide with a firearm. If people still kill themselves, but pick another means, are these laws really preventing anything? I'd say not.

Further, this tries to present this as a causal connection, that weaker gun laws cause more firearm-related suicides, and doesn't recognize that higher gun ownership likely correlates to fewer gun control laws on the whole. Higher gun ownership means that people who want to take their own lives are more likely to own a firearm already, like Bob.

But I'm not surprised to see all these reports saying gun control prevents suicides.

Despite their claims following Bruen, anti-gunners are having to deal with the fact that there are more guns on the streets than ever before, and the homicide rate nosedived last year, and it wasn't the first year of a drop in the murder rate. While I'm not going to fall into the same trap they do and definitively claim it is because of gun rights, it does show that their narrative was absolute nonsense.

So, they have to try something else, and suicides are that something else.

But suicides are a mental health issue. It's the end result of a series of mental health problems that aren't addressed by removing guns from the equation, which you're not really going to do despite the anti-gunners' claims. It's addressed through psychology, through treatment, and support from loved ones.

For anti-gun groups, though, none of that matters. All that matters to them is using whatever they can to advance their agenda.

Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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