this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
310 points (96.7% liked)

News

23387 readers
2990 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Senior men have higher rates of suicide than average, and firearms were involved in more than three-quarters of those deaths in 2021, according to a CDC report

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ABCDE@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I spot checked numbers around the world and the suicide rates are fairly consistent regardless of gun laws.

Why did you pick out gun laws specifically, and not access?

[–] remotelove@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Stricter gun control laws should imply less access. One of the nordic countries may be an exception off the top of my head, as one of them has strict gun control laws but many people still own a gun. Finland, maybe? That absolutely needs more research by me so take that with a grain of salt.

(I am going to clearly re-emphasize "spot check" here, as well.)

If countries like Japan and South Korea had lower numbers of suicides, that may indicate that gun laws play a part in that. (Japan was the exact reason I added a disclaimer about cultural views affecting suicide. Their history with ritual suicide is interesting but probably doesn't carry over much to today. )

Comparing any other countries total suicide rates to to that of the U.S. was a fairly quick search. My searches gave results for the years between 2020 and 2022 usually. There were a ton of different results, but I could say that a "decent" world average is about 15 in 100,000. If I remember correctly, I saw everything between 10-25 deaths per 100k, maybe more or less.

The U.S. averaged around 18'ish per 100k, which seems a hair higher, but not outrageously high.

If there was a direct correlation between firearm access and suicide, it should create a hell of an outlier for U.S. suicides in total. Also, I did read a few studies on preferred methods of suicide based on gender and also suicide methods in general but that was irrelevant to the topic. (I was looking to see if access to guns increases suicide rates not if access to guns influenced the preferred method of suicide.)

For a quick glance, that should be sufficient.