|
 In the 10 states with the highest youth suicide rates, 53 percent of
households owned guns. In the 10 states with the lowest youth
suicide rates, only 20 percent of households owned guns, according
to the study published in the American Journal of Preventive
Medicine.
Researchers from Boston University School of Public Health analyzed
household gun ownership in all 50 states in 2004 and youth suicide
rates between 2005 and 2015.
The highest rate of household gun ownership in 2004 was in Wyoming
(65.5 percent); the lowest was in Hawaii (10.2 percent).
Over the next 10 years, the youth suicide rate ranged from a high of
15.2 per 100,000 youth in Alaska to a low of 2.6 per 100,000 in New
Jersey.
After accounting for more than a dozen sociodemographic and health
factors that can contribute to suicide risk - such as depression,
alcoholism, substance abuse and education - the researchers found
that for each 10 percentage-point increase in a state's rate of
household gun ownership, the youth suicide rate went up by nearly 27
percent.
Higher levels of household gun ownership were associated with higher
rates of overall youth suicide - not necessarily suicide by firearm,
the research team found.
Dr. Michael Siegel, the senior author of the study, told Reuters
Health that while earlier studies have found household firearm
ownership to be linked with youth suicide rates at the state level,
the link could potentially be explained by those households simply
having a higher prevalence of people with depression, suicidal
ideation or suicidal behaviors.
"We found that the relationship persisted even after controlling for
these variables," Siegel said in an email. "This suggests that the
association is due to the increased availability and access to a
highly lethal means of suicide."
Lowering the prevalence of household gun ownership might help
prevent youth suicides, the authors suggest.
[to top of second column] |
Cathy Barber of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who
wasn't involved with the study, offered a different perspective.
Rather than assuming the answer must be more restrictive gun laws,
she said, "The work that I think holds more promise right now is for
opinion leaders in the gun-owning community . . . to promote that a
basic tenet of firearm safety is ensuring your guns aren't
accessible to a person who is at risk for suicide."
Barber told Reuters Health by email that gun owners are often
diligent about keeping their guns secure when their kids are little
but ease up when children become teenagers, precisely the age when
their risk for both unintentional shootings and for suicide goes up.
In the current study, however, the proportion of gun households with
unlocked and loaded firearms wasn't linked with youth suicide rates.
Data on gun ownership, suicide risk factors and suicide rates,
respectively, came from the 2004 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance
System, in which a representative sample of adults in each state
were interviewed by telephone; the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance
System, an in-school survey administered every odd year to a
representative sample of youth in ninth through 12th grades in each
state; and from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and
the National Vital Statistics program.
Among the study's limitations is that much of the data came from
surveys, which are not necessarily reliable.
The authors say further research is needed to determine whether
public policies might help limit youth access to firearms and result
in subsequent reductions in youth deaths by suicide.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2Dia9lk American Journal of Preventive
Medicine, online January 17, 2019.
[© 2019 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2019 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content. |
