Suicide without a gun...

[Drew]

The mere presence of guns has not been shown to cause suicides, just as the mere presence of guns has not been shown to cause homicides. Instead, those who commit suicide suffer from mental issues, and if they could not gain access to a gun, they would use another means of committing suicide. Such is the case in countries such as Germany and Japan, where the suicide rate is considerably higher than the U.S., yet gun ownership is considerably lower. For those interested, the detailed statistics can be seen here.

Not a valid line of argument. There are a variety of factors that lead to suicide, not merely the availability of weapons.

To address this properly, one needs to ask the following question: "Within the specific demographic that is covered by the gun control law, does the presence of the gun control laws produce a reduction in suicide by gun that is not accompanied by a compensatory increase in suicide by other means.

 

[follower of Christ]

SUICIDE - Methods

http://www.schenkenberg.nl/suicide.html
1. HANGING

2 methods
1. asphyxiation (dangle on end of rope for 10 minutes)
Time: 5 to 10 minutes
Available: Rope, solid support 10 foot above ground
Certainty: Fairly certain (discovery, rope/support snapping)
Notes: Brain damage likely if rescued. Very painful depending on rope. Most common effective form of suicide. See later "Asphyxiation" section. Someone did this about 10 meters from where I was sleeping once. Worked perfectly.
2. breaking neck
Time: Should be instant if it does break. See previous if not
Available: Rope, solid support, 10 foot space below, several above
Certainty: Very certain if the rope/support doesn't break
Notes: Minimal danger of discovery (depends on location). Painless if you drop far enough (8 foot is optimum). Make sure that the rope is tied securely to something strong!! It has to support your weight multiplied by the force of the drop (in g). Use a hangman's knot (with the knot at the back of your neck).

Calle: I got this table of appropriate falling heights from a.s.h. long-time regular MegaZone (megazone@wpi.wpi.edu), who got it from a friend of his named Mark.

 

[follower of Christ]

Blowing away antigun rhetoric one absurd statement at a time

.

Japans Gun FREE Society and its horrible SUICIDE rates prove that suicide ISNT slowed by removing guns...

Gun control in Japan is the most stringent in the democratic world.
The weapons law begins by stating 'No-one shall possess a fire-arm or fire-arms or a sword or swords', and very few exceptions are allowed.[3] Gun ownership is minuscule, and so is gun crime. As gun crime in other nations increases, many advocates of gun control urge that Japan's gun control policy be imitated.[4]

http://www.davekopel.com/2a/lawrev/japa ... ontrol.htm

And yet Japan has a higher suicide rate than the USA...

Why So Many Suicides in Japan?
It's the economy, stupid. And the health-care system. And the religious beliefs. And the …
By Christopher BeamPosted Thursday, May 31, 2007, at 6:39 PM ET


Japan's agriculture minister hanged himself Monday amid allegations of bid-rigging and padding government expenses. The following day, an executive allegedly linked to one of the scams leapt to his death. In 2005, 32,552 people killed themselves in Japan—one of the highest suicide rates among industrialized nations. Why are there so many suicides in Japan?

There's no single factor, but experts point to a combination of economic woes, poor mental-health resources, lack of religious prohibition, and cultural acceptance of the practice.* The economic recession that hit in the late 1990s seemed to increase the number of suicides, which jumped by 35 percent in 1998. Japan's high-interest loan system and historically strict bankruptcy laws may have contributed to this effect. But the Japanese suicide rate remains elevated, even though the economy has since recovered. Even before the recession, the rate was already a third higher than that of the United States. (Not that Japan is setting any records: Hungary, Estonia, and Latvia, among others, have more suicides per capita than Japan.)

Huh....I guess the Japanese have found ANOTHER way to off themselves.
I guess that shoots down those theories...


.

 

[follower of Christ]

.
Harvard Journal Study of Worldwide Data Obliterates Notion that Gun Ownership Correlates with Violence

Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy Confirms that Reducing Gun Ownership by Law-Abiding Citizens Does Nothing to Reduce Violence Worldwide

By now, any informed American is familiar with Dr. John R. Lott, Jr.'s famous axiom of "More Guns, Less Crime." In other words, American jurisdictions that allow law-abiding citizens to exercise their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms are far safer and more crime-free than jurisdictions that enact stringent "gun control" laws.

Very simply, the ability of law-abiding citizens to possess firearms has helped reduce violent crime in America.

Now, a Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy study shows that this is not just an American phenomenon. According to the study, worldwide gun ownership rates do not correlate with higher murder or suicide rates. In fact, many nations with high gun ownership have significantly lower murder and suicide rates.

In their piece entitled Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and some Domestic Evidence, Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser eviscerate "the mantra that more guns mean more deaths and that fewer guns, therefore, mean fewer deaths." In so doing, the authors provide fascinating historical insight into astronomical murder rates in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they dispel the myths that widespread gun ownership is somehow unique to the United States or that America suffers from the developed world's highest murder rate.

To the contrary, they establish that Soviet murder rates far exceeded American murder rates, and continue to do so today, despite Russia's extremely stringent gun prohibitions. By 2004, they show, the Russian murder rate was nearly four times higher than the American rate.

More fundamentally, Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser demonstrate that other developed nations such as Norway, Finland, Germany, France and Denmark maintain high rates of gun ownership, yet possess murder rates lower than other developed nations in which gun ownership is much more restricted.

For example, handguns are outlawed in Luxembourg, and gun ownership extremely rare, yet its murder rate is nine times greater than in Germany,which has one of the highest gun ownership rates in Europe .
As another example, Hungary's murder rate is nearly three times higher than nearby Austria's, but Austria's gun ownership rate is over eight times higher than Hungary's. "Norway," they note, "has far and away Western Europe's highest household gun ownership rate (32%), but also its lowest murder rate. The Netherlands," in contrast, "has the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe (1.9%) ... yet the Dutch gun murder rate is higher than the Norwegian."

Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser proceed to dispel the mainstream misconception that lower rates of violence in Europe are somehow attributable to gun control laws. Instead, they reveal, "murder in Europe was at an all-time low before the gun controls were introduced." As the authors note, "strict controls did not stem the general trend of ever-growing violent crime throughout the post-WWII industrialized world."

Citing England, for instance, they reveal that "when it had no firearms restrictions [in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries], England had little violent crime." By the late 1990s, however, "England moved from stringent controls to a complete ban on all handguns and many types of long guns." As a result, "by the year 2000, violent crime had so increased that England and Wales had Europe's highest violent crime rate, far surpassing even the United States." In America, on the other hand, "despite constant and substantially increasing gun ownership, the United States saw progressive and dramatic reductions in criminal violence in the 1990s."

Critically, Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser note that "the fall in the American crime rate is even more impressive when compared with the rest of the world," where 18 of the 25 countries surveyed by the British Home Office suffered violent crime increases during that same period.

Furthermore, the authors highlight the important point that while the American gun murder rate often exceeds that in other nations, the overall per capita murder rate in other nations (including other means such as strangling, stabbing, beating, etc.) is oftentimes much higher than in America.

The reason that gun ownership doesn't correlate with murder rates, the authors show, is that violent crime rates are determined instead by underlying cultural factors. "Ordinary people," they note, "simply do not murder." Rather, "the murderers are a small minority of extreme antisocial aberrants who manage to obtain guns whatever the level of gun ownership" in their society.

Therefore, "banning guns cannot alleviate the socio-cultural and economic factors that are the real determinants of violence and crime rates." According to Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser, "there is no reason for laws prohibiting gun possession by ordinary, law-abiding, responsible adults because such people virtually never commit murder. If one accepts that such adults are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than to commit it, disarming them becomes not just unproductive but counter-productive."

John Lott couldn't have stated it better himself.

http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/ ... ership.htm

 

[Drew]

Blowing away antigun rhetoric, one absurd statement at a time..

Japans Gun FREE Society and is horrible SUICIDE rates prove that suicide ISNT slowed by removing guns...

Gun control in Japan is the most stringent in the democratic world.
The weapons law begins by stating 'No-one shall possess a fire-arm or fire-arms or a sword or swords', and very few exceptions are allowed.[3] Gun ownership is minuscule, and so is gun crime. As gun crime in other nations increases, many advocates of gun control urge that Japan's gun control policy be imitated.[4]

http://www.davekopel.com/2a/lawrev/japa ... ontrol.htm

And yet Japan has a higher suicide rate than the USA..

[quote:2osfvltf]Why So Many Suicides in Japan?It's the economy, stupid. And the health-care system. And the religious beliefs. And the …
By Christopher BeamPosted Thursday, May 31, 2007, at 6:39 PM ET


Japan's agriculture minister hanged himself Monday amid allegations of bid-rigging and padding government expenses. The following day, an executive allegedly linked to one of the scams leapt to his death. In 2005, 32,552 people killed themselves in Japan—one of the highest suicide rates among industrialized nations. Why are there so many suicides in Japan?

There's no single factor, but experts point to a combination of economic woes, poor mental-health resources, lack of religious prohibition, and cultural acceptance of the practice.* The economic recession that hit in the late 1990s seemed to increase the number of suicides, which jumped by 35 percent in 1998. Japan's high-interest loan system and historically strict bankruptcy laws may have contributed to this effect. But the Japanese suicide rate remains elevated, even though the economy has since recovered. Even before the recession, the rate was already a third higher than that of the United States. (Not that Japan is setting any records: Hungary, Estonia, and Latvia, among others, have more suicides per capita than Japan.)

Huh....I guess the Japanese have found ANOTHER way to off themselves.
I guess that shoots down those theories...[/quote:2osfvltf]
All of this is entirely irrelevant to the matter at issue.

Yes, the reasons for higher suicides in Japan are complex and many. And, yes, Japanese do indeed kill themselves in the absence of guns.

That is clearly not the point. The question is this: "would the Japanese have even higher suicide rates if guns were available to them as a means to act on these suicidal urges?"

Again, the reader needs to understand that a high suicide rate is a country with no guns is not evidence that availability to guns does not worsen the suicide risk in another country. And, as already stated, we do not know that the introduction of guns into Japan would not make the suicide scenario there even worse.

 

[follower of Christ]

Suicides in Europe

Nor, finally, have these anti-gun laws stopped suicide, something which has always been a much greater problem in Europe than in the U.S. In this respect, one can note a curious (but invariable) omission when anti-gun articles compare the U.S. to Europe.2

Anti-gun propaganda emphasizes suicide as well as homicide. U.S. suicide rates have risen over the past quarter century (while U.S. homicide rates have declined). However, anti-gun advocates recently have taken to combining suicide and homicide figures in the U.S. This allows them to conceal the decline in U.S. homicide rates (and to exaggerate the so-called "societal costs" of gun ownership). They have done this more particularly in the last few years while the U.S. homicide rate has been declining (despite a 100 per cent increase in handgun ownership since the 1970s).

But then, inconsistently, when comparing the U.S. to Europe, they only compare the homicide rates. They never use the combined homicide-suicide figure--because it would refute their entire argument; it shows that Europe`s homicide-suicide combined rates are higher than that of the U.S.

http://www.nraila.org/Issues/Articles/Read.aspx?ID=72

 

[follower of Christ]

Controversy has also swirled around Dr. Kellerman's claim that gun availability increases the risk of suicide. Dr. Faria says "the overwhelming available evidence compiled from the psychiatric literature is that untreated or poorly managed depression is the real culprit behind high rates of suicide."

Backing this up is the observation that countries with strict gun control laws and low rates of firearm availability -- such as Japan, Germany and the Scandinavian countries -- have suicide rates that are 2 time to 3 times higher than for the U.S. In these countries, people simply substitute for guns other suicide methods such as Hara-Kiri, carbon monoxide suffocation, hanging, or chemical poisoning.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,7217,00.html

 

[follower of Christ]

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Harvard Study: Gun Control Is Counterproductive

I've just learned that Washington, D.C.'s petition for a rehearing of the Parker case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit was denied today. This is good news. Readers will recall in this case that the D.C. Circuit overturned the decades-long ban on gun ownership in the nation's capitol on Second Amendment grounds.

However, as my colleague Peter Ferrara explained in his National Review Online article following the initial decision in March, it looks very likely that the United States Supreme Court will take the case on appeal. When it does so - beyond seriously considering the clear original intent of the Second Amendment to protect an individual's right to armed self-defense - the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court would be wise to take into account the findings of a recent study out of Harvard.

The study, which just appeared in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694), set out to answer the question in its title: "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence." Contrary to conventional wisdom, and the sniffs of our more sophisticated and generally anti-gun counterparts across the pond, the answer is "no." And not just no, as in there is no correlation between gun ownership and violent crime, but an emphatic no, showing a negative correlation: as gun ownership increases, murder and suicide decreases.

The findings of two criminologists - Prof. Don Kates and Prof. Gary Mauser - in their exhaustive study of American and European gun laws and violence rates, are telling:

Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population).

For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland's murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns. As the study's authors write in the report:

If the mantra "more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death" were true, broad cross-national comparisons should show that nations with higher gun ownership per capita consistently have more death. Nations with higher gun ownership rates, however, do not have higher murder or suicide rates than those with lower gun ownership. Indeed many high gun ownership nations have much lower murder rates. (p. 661)

Finally, and as if to prove the bumper sticker correct - that "gun don't kill people, people do" - the study also shows that Russia's murder rate is four times higher than the U.S. and more than 20 times higher than Norway. This, in a country that practically eradicated private gun ownership over the course of decades of totalitarian rule and police state methods of suppression. Needless to say, very few Russian murders involve guns.

The important thing to keep in mind is not the rate of deaths by gun - a statistic that anti-gun advocates are quick to recite - but the overall murder rate, regardless of means. The criminologists explain:

[P]er capita murder overall is only half as frequent in the United States as in several other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by strangling, stabbing, or beating is much more frequent. (p. 663 - emphases in original)

It is important to note here that Profs. Kates and Mauser are not pro-gun zealots. In fact, they go out of their way to stress that their study neither proves that gun control causes higher murder rates nor that increased gun ownership necessarily leads to lower murder rates. (Though, in my view, Prof. John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime does indeed prove the latter.) But what is clear, and what they do say, is that gun control is ineffectual at preventing murder, and apparently counterproductive.

Not only is the D.C. gun ban ill-conceived on constitutional grounds, it fails to live up to its purpose. If the astronomical murder rate in the nation's capitol, in comparison to cities where gun ownership is permitted, didn't already make that fact clear, this study out of Harvard should.

http://www.theacru.org/blog/2007/05/har ... roductive/

 

[follower of Christ]

.
One more for the home team...

As for the death rate from firearms accidents, Canada continued to enjoy a decline that had begun in 1971.

Suicides involving firearms fell noticeably after 1978, reversing the previous trend. The overall suicide rate, however, did not drop, which leads to the inference that the availability of particular weapons has no impact on a nation's suicide rate. America's suicide rate, already slighter lower than Canada's, declined some more. In short, the evidence indicates that Canada's handgun crackdown/long gun licensing had little effect on crime or suicide.

http://www.davekopel.com/2a/Mags/The-Fa ... ontrol.htm

 

[follower of Christ]

.
Id like to toss out here that in 1989 my own father took his life with a 357 magnum revolver.
If ANYONE on this website has cause to be against guns...or look to blame them for suicide....*I* am one who would have that right.

But I know enough about my father to know that he was severely bipolar and when those downswings came the depression was horrible. He didnt kill himself because he had a gun. He killed himself because of his mental disorder likely caused by something that happened as an infant...the fact that his entire family had died in a horrible car crash leaving him as the sole survivor....and added to that the elderly lady that he had taken upon himself to care for like she was his own mother was ripped out of his home during one of his down points, which sent him over the edge.

He had no family. He had lost his job and had no income. He was bipolar most of his adult life.
He needed TREATMENT so that he would NOT WANT to die....the gun he used was merely the mode he chose.
I know my father. Had he not had a gun he would have done something else to end it because in his mind his life was simply not worth living during those depressed times.


People blaming the gun for suicide quite frankly know NOTHING about depression.

.

 

[Drew]

People blaming the gun for suicide quite frankly know NOTHING about depression.

While I empathize with your loss, this kind of generalization needs to be supported.

 

[follower of Christ]

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Gun Control is not Crime Control

The prohibition of handguns is naive and misguided for several reasons: 1) handguns do not pose a serious threat to Canadians; 2) handgun bans simply don't work; 3) such a ban violates our sense of due process by confiscating legally purchased private property; 4) the campaign to ban handguns is counterproductive as it draws attention away from truly effective ways to fight criminal violence. To the extent that prohibitions have any effect, they tend to cause people who would have used the prohibited firearm to substitute another weapon. One would expect that the prohibition of small handguns would cause criminals to move to larger, more deadly calibers of handguns and rifles.

It is important to note, first, that despite well-publicized atrocities, handguns do not pose a serious danger to Canadians. They are not widely misused in this country. Only about 0.1 percent of handgun owners have fatal accidents with them, or use their firearms to commit violent crimes or to commit suicide. There are an estimated 256,000 households with handguns in Canada. Angus Reid, op. cit., p. 8.Note On average, handguns are involved in under 200 deaths annually including suicides.


Conclusions

Gun control is not crime control. The government's gun control proposals will not reduce violent crime, suicide, or firearms accidents. This pessimistic evaluation is supported by the failure of a variety of gun-control measures around the world to improve public safety. Even the Auditor General in 1993 doubted the value of further gun control legislation. Gun control is merely a prescription for rapid growth in the federal bureaucracy.

http://oldfraser.lexi.net/publications/ ... /1995/gun/

 

[follower of Christ]

3. But even if most of the deaths are suicides, won't gun control help?

While suicides account for the overwhelming majority of all gun-related
deaths in Canada (80% in 1987), over two-thirds of all suicides are
committed by methods other than firearms[19].

For "gun control" to prevent suicides, potential suicides would have to
be very fleeting impulses that would pass before a person could get a
key, put it into a lock, open the lock, load the firearm, and fire it.
Since roughly as many people hang/suffocate/strangle themselves, the
argument is absurd.

Many suicides are contemplated for weeks or months and there are many
methods that are just as "impulsive" and just as deadly, such as jumping
off buildings.

Canada has very strict firearm regulation yet it also has a higher
suicide rate than the US.

http://stason.org/TULARC/society/guns-c ... un-co.html

 

[Drew]

From a Study published in the New England Journal of Medecince in 2008 (authors = Miller and Hemenway)

The empirical evidence linking suicide risk in the United States to the presence of firearms in the home is compelling. There are at least a dozen U.S. case–control studies in the peer-reviewed literature, all of which have found that a gun in the home is associated with an increased risk of suicide. The increase in risk is large, typically 2 to 10 times that in homes without guns, depending on the sample population (e.g., adolescents vs. older adults) and on the way in which the firearms were stored. The association between guns in the home and the risk of suicide is due entirely to a large increase in the risk of suicide by firearm that is not counterbalanced by a reduced risk of nonfirearm suicide. Moreover, the increased risk of suicide is not explained by increased psychopathologic characteristics, suicidal ideation, or suicide attempts among members of gun-owning households.

 

[Drew]

The mere presence of guns has not been shown to cause suicides, just as the mere presence of guns has not been shown to cause homicides. Instead, those who commit suicide suffer from mental issues, and if they could not gain access to a gun, they would use another means of committing suicide.

This statement seems very sensible - why blame the "instrument" or "tool" for some action - a homicide or a suicide - whose "cause" rather obviously lies in the mind of a disturbed individual? Like some other common sense notions, it gains its purchase through being a sensible answer to a bad question, a question that is never critically challenged. We are inclined to not "question the question" to which "the gun is not to blame, the person is to blame" is an answer and we are therefore sold - the gun is not "to blame" for the suicide or the homicide.

Such is the appeal of such a line of argument - the problem with it is "one level removed" and therefore not easily glimpsed. But, of course, the underlying premise which informs the implied question "Who is to blame, the gun or the person"? is flawed. And therefore, while it seems eminently sensible to conclude that inanimate objects like guns can hardly be to blame for homicides and suicides, the real issue here is not where "intent" is vested but rather how the gun might function as an enabler.

Hopefully no one in this debate believes that guns (or other weapons) possess evil intent - we all know that this is not so. As has been explained in grisly technical detail in other posts, the issue is the degree to which the availability of the gun empowers the agent that does have all the intent - the human being - to turn that intent into a tragic reality.

 

[follower of Christ]

Guns and suicide: possible effects of some specific legislation

CL Rich, JG Young, RC Fowler, J Wagner and NA Black
Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego.

The authors describe suicide rates in Toronto and Ontario and methods used for suicide in Toronto for 5 years before and after enactment of Canadian gun control legislation in 1978. They also present data from San Diego, Calif., where state laws attempt to limit access to guns by certain psychiatric patients.
Both sets of data indicate that gun control legislation may have led to decreased use of guns by suicidal men, but the difference was apparently offset by an increase in suicide by leaping. In the case of men using guns for suicide, these data support a hypothesis of substitution of suicide method.

http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/con ... /147/3/342

Huh...imagine that...


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[follower of Christ]

"While gun-related suicides were reduced by Canada's gun control legislation of 1978, the overall suicide rate did not go down at all: the gun-related suicides were replaced 100% by an increase in other types of suicide -- mostly jumping off bridges"

"The authors describe suicide rates in Toronto and Ontario and methods used for suicide in Toronto for 5 years before and after enactment of Canadian gun control legislation in 1978. They also present data from San Diego, Calif., where state laws attempt to limit access to guns by certain psychiatric patients. Both sets of data indicate that gun control legislation may have led to decreased use of guns by suicidal men, but the difference was apparently offset by an increase in suicide by leaping.
In the case of men using guns for suicide, these data support a hypothesis of substitution of suicide method."

http://www.pulpless.com/gunclock/suicide.html

 

[follower of Christ]

I'll defer any discussion of Canada since I will be followed by a Canadian expert who would immediately say that everything I said was wrong. But, I would suggest that there is strong criminological evidence that in Canada, which in some ways has a gun culture closer to the United States than other nations do, there are criminologists who will go back and forth on this, some will say the Canadian gun laws are great, others will say they've been absolutely ineffective and maybe have even done some harm.
I think they would all agree that the Canadian gun laws have reduced gun suicide.
There would be a disagreement about whether they reduced total suicide or whether there's been a substitution effect.

http://www.davidkopel.com/2A/LawRev/lrnylstk.htm

 

[follower of Christ]

Even the opposition agrees...

Rich, C L; Wagner, J; Fowler, R C; Young, J G; Black, N A ‘Guns and suicide: possible effects of some specific legislation’ in American Journal of Psychiatry; 147 (Mar 90) p.342-6

Describes suicide rates in Toronto and Ontario and methods used for suicide in Toronto for 5 years before and after enactment of Canadian gun control legislation in 1978. Presents data form San Diego, California, where state laws attempt to limit access to guns by certain psychiatric patients.
Both sets of data indicate that gun control legislation may have led to decreased use of guns by suicidal men, but the difference was apparently offset by an increase in suicide by leaping.


http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF03.htm

 

[Drew]

Guns and suicide: possible effects of some specific legislation

CL Rich, JG Young, RC Fowler, J Wagner and NA Black
Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego.

The authors describe suicide rates in Toronto and Ontario and methods used for suicide in Toronto for 5 years before and after enactment of Canadian gun control legislation in 1978. They also present data from San Diego, Calif., where state laws attempt to limit access to guns by certain psychiatric patients.
Both sets of data indicate that gun control legislation may have led to decreased use of guns by suicidal men, but the difference was apparently offset by an increase in suicide by leaping. In the case of men using guns for suicide, these data support a hypothesis of substitution of suicide method.

http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/con ... /147/3/342

Huh...imagine that...

From the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science:

Countries differ in the most popular method for suicide, but firearms are the preferred method in some, including Canada and the United States. In the United States, Lester (1984) found that states with the stricter gun control laws had lower rates of suicide using guns but similar rates of suicide by other methods, suggesting that strict gun control laws reduced the suicide rate and that people did not switch to any great extent to other methods for suicide when guns were less readily available. However, some researchers have disputed this conclusion. In Canada, for example, Rich, Young, Fowler, Wagner and Black (1990) reported that stricter gun control laws in Toronto, Canada, led to a decrease in the percentage of suicides using guns but led to a matching increase in the percentage of suicides jumping to their death. The research,thus, presents mixed results.

Rich et al's (1990) study, however, was based on only a small sample of suicides in one city in Canada, making generalization of the statistical analysis problematic.

The data on "suicide by another means" appears mixed. according to this article.