Reducing the Gun Suicide Rate in America

                                     

             The mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado and Newtown, Connecticut have provided us with a window to examine our attitudes towards guns. As a public health professional, I believe that we need to take a public health approach to preventing gun violence. Tragically, in the United States, there were more than 30,000 deaths, including 17, 000 suicides, from gun violence in the United States in 2005 – the equivalent of 100 Boeing Dreamliners crashing and killing all their passengers and crew.   

            Some in the pro-gun lobby, including the National Rifle Association (NRA) are arguing that it is not guns that kill people, but people that kill people.  These same arguments were once used by the automobile industry to resist government mandated safety improvements for new cars. Detroit claimed that it was not the cars that kill people, but unsafe drivers who did. After decades of government-mandated safety improvements, which the auto industry resisted – everything from seatbelts to roll bars, to safety glass - cars are much safer and traffic deaths are down dramatically. And drivers are still the same as they always were. So indeed, it was unsafe cars that kill people.  

            The gun lobby has done its utmost to keep public health researchers from conducting studies on gun violence. Likely they are afraid of the inevitable conclusion about gun ownership – guns don’t provide us with security in our homes. In fact, they increase the risk that someone in the family will be the victim of a firearm homicide. We have seen this recently with the tragic death of Reeva Steenkamp, the girlfriend of Olympian and Para-Olympian Oscar Pistorius. Reeva was a stunning model, and a promising young law student. She was either murdered or accidentally killed in Pistorius’ bedroom with a 9 millimeter handgun.   

            In spite of the NRA’s efforts to squelch research into firearm violence, David Hemenway of the Harvard School of Public Health recently published a study about the relationship between guns and suicide. Hemenway found that 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 (especially when there are young people in the home). The study also points out 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. To paraphrase the singer Jimmy Buffet, a gun-suicide is “a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”  

            The NRA has taken its efforts to squelch research and information sharing about the relationship between guns and homicide/suicide to new heights with its support of laws that are being promoted in more than 20 states that prohibit doctors from talking to their patients about gun violence.  In fact, Florida has passed such a law, though it is still being contested in the courts. Imagine this – a patient comes into the doctor’s office and says “Doctor, I am feeling depressed and suicidal.” Under these laws the doctor cannot even ask the patient about the presence of firearms in the patient’s home.  Nor could the doctor advise the patient to get the guns out of the home, at least temporarily.

            There are many steps that could be taken to reduce the number of gun suicides in America.  But I am conscious of arguments that the Second Amendments seems to give us the liberty to own guns and prevents the government from restricting this right.  So I am going to make some policy recommendations that respect peoples’ rights to bear arms, but will reduce the rate of violence.  First, the Federal government should eliminate all restrictions on research by national institutes into the relationship between guns and homicides/suicides.  Second, the Federal government should increase the amount of funding available for such research to make up for the years in which research was suppressed by the NRA. Third, the Federal Government should launch a special study to look into the relationship between guns in the home and family violence. Fourth, the Federal Government should, under its obligation to protect the First Amendment rights of free speech, ensure that every physician in the country is fully informed of the dangers of gun violence and encouraged to warn patients about these dangers. Finally, states and localities should require gun owners to keep their guns under lock and key, except when they are being used at a safe practice range.  These simple policies will not restrict any individual liberties, but will go a long way to reducing the tragic national scourge of suicide by firearm.