Perhaps one of the dumbest lines of attack on the Second Amendment is to use suicides in their statistics.
While suicides are a problem and something that should be addressed, that just means better mental health resources, removing the stigma for mental illness so people will get the help they need, and things of that sort. Gun control isn’t really a viable solution because, well, suicides happen with things other than guns all the time.
But those that push this line of “reasoning” continue to do so, and they’ll use some pretty wacky stuff to try and justify it, like this study.
States with lower rates of gun ownership and stronger gun violence prevention laws have the lowest overall suicide rates in the nation according to a new Violence Policy Center (VPC) analysis of 2022 data (the most recent year available) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. Conversely, states with the highest suicide rates have higher gun ownership rates and weaker gun violence prevention laws.
The tables below list the states with the three lowest and three highest overall suicide rates in 2022 and include for each state its overall suicide rate, gun suicide rate, total number of suicides and gun suicides, percentage of suicides that involved a gun, and average household gun ownership rate. A similar table for all 50 states ranked by overall suicide rate is available at https://vpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/2022-State-Overall-Suicide-Rates-ranked-by-rate.pdf.
The state with the lowest overall suicide rate in 2022 was New Jersey (7.6 suicides per 100,000 residents) with a gun suicide rate of 2.2 gun suicides per 100,000 residents. Massachusetts ranked second lowest (overall suicide rate of 8.3 suicides per 100,000 residents) with a gun suicide rate of 2.0 gun suicides per 100,000 residents. New York ranked third lowest (overall suicide rate of 8.5 suicides per 100,000 residents) with a gun suicide rate of 2.3 gun suicides per 100,000 residents. In each of these three states guns were used in less than 30 percent of the suicides reported that year and all had a household gun ownership rate below 20 percent. Compared to the three states with the highest suicide rates, each of these states has stronger gun violence prevention laws.
So this looks at the overall suicide rate and somehow deduces that gun laws impact the overall suicide rate.
Then again, it’s the Violence Policy Center, which is just an anti-gun organization that will do whatever it can to advance the narrative.
But do their findings show what they claim?
First, let’s remember that more than half of the nation has constitutional carry and a whole lot of other states have opted not to embrace some of the most extreme anti-gun laws out there. As a result, it’s not difficult to create a list that has a lot of pro-gun states at the top of it for something like suicides. There are also a lot of pro-gun states near the other end of the list, where there are fewer suicides. Florida ranks 39th–there are a number of ties throughout this list, so keep that in mind when you see what number a state is on there–Texas is 36th and Georgia is in a tie for 34th.
Meanwhile, an interesting note is how pro-gun Tennessee is tied with anti-gun Hawaii–and Hawaii had fewer than 20 percent of its suicides committed with a firearm compared to Tennessee’s nearly 70 percent. An interesting tidbit, don’t you think?
It should be noted that those states at the top of this list are also states where there is a fairly sparse population. Loneliness and isolation tend to play a significant factor in things like depression, which can result in suicide.
See, that’s something we need to remember about “studies” like this. There’s no attempt at controlling for any other factors such as economics–another potential trigger for depression and suicidal thoughts–or literally anything else.
This is a search for correlation, not causation. They’re simply trying to paint guns as bad and hoping no one will look any deeper. Yet when you really look, you start to see that the percentage of gun suicides in most anti-gun states is on-par with the average, more or less. You see pro-gun states and anti-gun states scattered in and amongst one another, for the most part.
What you don’t see, though, is any clear delineation between pro-gun and anti-gun states. That’s because it’s not the guns.
Guns don’t cause suicides. They don’t cause crime or mass murder or ingrown toenails. They don’t cause anything because they’re inanimate objects. They have no volition of their own.
People are where the problem lies and nothing in this study remotely shows otherwise. In the case of suicides, ignoring that means people suffering needlessly because they don’t know how to deal with it and people like the VPC are focused on the wrong things.
