TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2019//
TI  - Gun laws and suicides
JO  - American journal of epidemiology
A1  - Ghiani, Marco
A1  - Hawkins, Summer Sherburne
A1  - Baum, Christopher F.
SP  - 1254
EP  - 1261
VL  - 188
IS  - 7
N2  - 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. <br><br>RESULTS advocate for stricter gun laws and additional policies are needed for populations who shifted to non-firearm suicides.<br><br>© 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.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 0002-9262
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwz069
ID  - ref1
ER  -