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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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I hope I can ask this without leading to a bunch of religious fervor about pro or anti-2A. For the record I support having some rights to guns, but as long as anyone claims 2A is a reason we can't have sensible legislation about guns, then I'm against 2A entirely. I say that in effort to establish I'm not asking in bad faith.
Violent crime is at an all time low, according to many articles. So how is gun violence at an all time high? Is there an excess of non-criminal gun violence? Like perhaps suicide is at a high? Police shootings making up the difference? Is there gun violence showing up in hospitals that isn't being reported to law enforcement? Is there a different standard of what constitutes gun violence between the healthcare and law enforcement communities?
I read the article and a couple of linked ones, but I couldn't find any answer. At first glance it doesn't seem like both things can be true, but I'm going to assume instead I'm just missing part of the picture, so what is it?
It's suicides. Almost 60% of gun deaths are suicides.
Gun deaths reached their last peak in the US around 1975. At that time the rate between homicide and suicide was about 50/50. So it's not like suicides were very low with guns, guns are probably the most quick and effective way to kill yourself and if you want to be dead, using a gun is the gold standard. Still, from 50% to 60% is a very significant change. It's also important to note, there is more variability in gun homicide than there is in suicide (though there is still a little bit of a positive correlation), so in times of low violent crime the disparity grows.
And we know it's not the guns that magically make people more suicidal...as there are multiple countries with basically 0 access to firearms with higher suicide rates than we have here in the USA. Japan is the main one.
Actually some countries with the highest suicide rates have decent gun control. Japan isn't in the top 10, and South Korea is the Asian country with high suicide rates and has strong gun control. Here are the 2024 countries with the most suicides per 100k, and the USA/Japan for reference.
Lesotho 72.4
Guyana 40.3
Eswatini 29.4
South Korea 28.6
Kiribati 28.3
Micronesia 28.2
Lithuania 26.1
Suriname 25.4
Russia 25.1
South Africa 23.5
#23 USA 16.1
#25 Japan 15.3
Here are the estimated guns owned per hundred residents
Lesotho 4.8
Guyana 15.8
Eswatini 4.8
South Korea 0.2
Kiribati 0.8
Micronesia 0.7
Lithuania 13.6
Suriname 15.9
Russia 12.3
South Africa 9.7
USA 120.5
Japan 0.3
I would need to graph this data for every country and year over year to see if there is a correlation. It would be hard to extrapolate especially considering so many different cultural beliefs on suicide and gun control/ownership.