To Reduce Suicide Rates, New Focus Turns to Guns

Sabrina Tavernise, reporting for the New York Times:

The national map of suicide lights up in states with the highest gun ownership rates. Wyoming, Montana and Alaska, the states with the three highest suicide rates, are also the top gun-owning states, according to the Harvard center. The state-level data are too broad to tell whether the deaths were in homes with guns, but a series of individual-level studies since the early 1990s found a direct link. Most researchers say the weight of evidence from multiple studies is that guns in the home increase the risk of suicide.

I wrote about the correlation between suicide rates and population density a while ago. Before researching the topic, I had suspected suicide rates might be higher in cities because of increased stress levels. Not so. They were higher in the countryside. Why? Higher rates of gun ownership.

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