this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 10 points 9 months ago

Not to diminish your comment, but this research is tautologically flawed:

Men who owned handguns were eight times more likely than men who didn't to die of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Women who owned handguns were more than 35 times more likely than women who didn't to kill themselves with a gun

I mean… obviously? I bet sailors get bit by sharks more than Great Plains farmers. This is the wrong denominator — they should be looking at all cause mortality and all types of suicide in gun owners vs others.

I definitely do believe owning a gun would have a higher suicide rate by making it more convenient to use the gun in a moment of weakness/impulse. 

That article brutalizes the original research for a scarier popping headline.

From the actual paper, the important bit:

Rates of suicide by any method were higher among handgun owners, with an adjusted hazard ratio of 3.34 for all male owners as compared with male nonowners (95% confidence interval [CI], 3.13 to 3.56) and 7.16 for female owners as compared with female nonowners (95% CI, 6.22 to 8.24).

 Handgun owners did not have higher rates of suicide by other methods or higher all-cause mortality. The risk of suicide by firearm among handgun owners peaked immediately after the first acquisition, but 52% of all suicides by firearm among handgun owners occurred more than 1 year after acquisition.

This is the interesting bit for me. If you remove people buying a gun for purpose of suicide, all cause mortality is the same, which indicates that purchase of a gun for suicide is a relatively small proportion of all gun owners.

Also important to note: this type of statistic does not differentiate no difference from not enough data to say there’s a difference, which is important. P value/frequentist statistics cannot say no effect, ever.