Do Guns Kill People or Do People Kill People?
Here in the United States there is a lot of misinformation about the cause/effect of Australia’s gun ban on crime in that country. Some are arguing that Oz's gun ban has lead to higher rates of violent crime. Plausible?
Never fear, Snopes is here to "take aim": at these “statistics:
This Washington Post article shows that, while it may be difficult to prove a correlation between Australia’s gun ban and its homicide rate, there is a strong correlation between the ban and suicide rates. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/08/02/did-gun-control-work-in-australia/.
Researchers in the US have found the same effect. David Hemenway of the Harvard School of Public Health published a study about the relationship between gun laws and rates of suicide. Quick and dirty - in states with lax gun laws, suicide rates with guns are 3.7 times higher than states with tight gun laws, while other types of suicides are the same. So, having access to a gun in the home puts the family at greater risk of a suicide than in a home without a gun (especially when there a young people around). The article also highlights the obvious that people who attempt suicide with a gun usually succeed, while those who try other means often fail and then often go on to lead normal lives after treatment. http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMp0805923.) To paraphrase the singer Jimmy Buffet, a gun-suicide is “a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”
The link between gun ownership and suicide is not an insignificant problem because suicide is the second highest cause of death among people under 40 in the US. In 2005, 46 Americans committed suicide with a firearm per day, accounting for 56% of daily suicides. It is clear that the rate of firearm suicide is related directly to the availability of guns and that suicides in the US could be greatly reduced if firearms were less available.
Some other interesting facts from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health: homicides are the second highest cause of death among youth aged 10 – 24 and 82% of these are firearm related. One-third of these deaths among youth are suicides. The US has a higher (by far) gun-related homicide rate among adolescents than the next 25 industrial countries (this alone calls into question the idea that “guns don’t kill people.”)
The argument that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” does not seem to hold water. With stricter gun laws, far few young people would die of homicide and suicide.
Ed’s policy prescriptions:
• If you own a gun make sure it’s locked away so that young people have no access to it whatsoever;
• If you have someone in the family experiencing mental illness, do not have a gun in the home;
• If you’d like to reduce the rate of homicide/suicide in the US, support tighter rules on gun ownership;
• If you’d like to reduce your chance of gun-related violence, consider moving to Australia (just a joke).
