Jesse Bering ponders one explanation for why men take their lives more than women do:
It’s mostly because they’re far more likely to use a gun to do the job.
In any given year, men account for about 80 percent of all suicides, and the lion’s share of those deaths are gun-related. Not all involve your standard handgun, either. There’s the occasional suicide by the more cumbersome or exotic firearm, too, such as a double-barreled shotgun, an Uzi, or an assault rifle. But you tend to find such “long gun” deaths only among younger men, and almost never in women. Most people who commit suicide were never keen on making Swiss cheese out of folks with automatic weapons, so they probably used a smaller, discreet firearm for their ego’s coup de grâce—one that they’d acquired originally “for protection” against all those other crazy people out there. These statistics on basic handguns being the most common type of firearm used for suicide also make sense from a simple agility perspective. After all, although teen suicides get the most press, it’s in fact the elderly male demographic, the age group with the sort of arthritic joints and Parkinson’s trembles that make handling a military-grade weapon a challenge, which accounts for the highest suicide rate. The same is true for all the setup and effort needed to hang oneself properly, the second deadliest suicide method.
In America, where the chances of finding a gun in the home (the place where, incidentally, most suicides occur) are about as good as finding a carton of milk in the fridge, there’s no better predictor of suicide than simply having access to a firearm. In one study, 25 percent of California residents who bought a gun killed themselves with that same gun within a year of the purchase. And although women aren’t as likely to go out and buy a handgun, when they do, they’re more likely to turn it on themselves; for the ladies subset of those new California gun owners, for instance, over half of these women used it to commit suicide in a matter of months.
Update: a number of readers have written in contesting a particular claim in Bering’s post:
Jesse Bering’s Scientific American post needs correcting, on the claim that “25 percent of California residents who bought a gun killed themselves with that same gun within a year of the purchase.” The NEJM article he linked to says 25% of deaths among that group in the following year were suicides: “Suicide by means of a firearm (188 of 857 deaths) ranked second among all causes of death.” The article analyzed “the 238,292 purchasers of handguns in California in 1991,” so in fact the correct number in Bering’s original claim would be 0.08%, not 25% (188/238,292).
Another adds:
The paper also isn’t persuasive in furthering the idea that having a gun made suicide more likely through it being present, while it’s not hard to think that having the means at hand might facilitate someone if they got an impulsive urge to commit suicide. However, the more plausible explanation for the statistical increase is that people who already wanted to kill themselves got a handgun, if not specifically for that purpose, then at least to provide them the option.
Problems like this typically emerge when studies are conducted seeking to show a causal relationship between guns and something – and devaluing the effects of human agency. It is easy to believe that some things are affected by the mere presence of a gun – accidents for certain, rash and impulsive acts, perhaps. But in many cases the gun is simply part of a thought-out trajectory toward another end.
The Dish 