Citation

Ghiani M, Hawkins SS, Baum CF. Am. J. Epidemiol. 2019; 188(7): 1254-1261.

Affiliation

Department of Macroeconomics, German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), Berlin, Germany.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/aje/kwz069

PMID

30874719

Abstract

The aim of this work was to examine the impact of a state gun law environment on suicides overall and within demographic subgroups. We linked 211,766 firearm suicides and 204,625 non-firearm suicides in the 50 states of the United States for 2005-2015 to the population in each state, year, race/ethnicity, sex, and age, as well as to an index of state-level gun control. Difference-in-differences zero-inflated negative-binomial models were used to evaluate the impact of strengthening gun control on firearm and non-firearm suicides. We subsequently stratified by sex and interacted the index by race/ethnicity and age. In the data, 25 states strengthened gun control by an average of 6 points. Such an increase may result in a 3.3% (IRR=0.967; 95% CI=0.938,0.996) decrease in firearm suicides. While no impact on non-firearm suicides was found overall, interacted models showed an increase in non-firearm suicides among black males, white and black females, and older individuals. Strengthening gun control may reduce firearm suicides overall, but may increase non-firearm suicides in some populations.

RESULTS advocate for stricter gun laws and additional policies are needed for populations who shifted to non-firearm suicides.

© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Language: en

Keywords

Gun laws; Policy analysis; Suicides