It’s impossible to talk honestly about gun death statistics in America without deciding how to categorize suicides. Even with the unfortunate surge in homicides in recent years, suicides still represent the majority of gun-related deaths. In 2023, the most recent year for which the CDC provides complete data through its Wonder tool, the United States recorded 46,751 gun-related deaths. Of those, 27,308 were suicides compared to 17,941 homicides.
In terms of percentage rates, suicides made up 58.4% of our gun-related deaths in 2023, with homicides accounting for 38.4%. The remaining balance of about 3.2% is a mix of unintentional deaths (458), law enforcement shootings (608), and gun-related deaths of undetermined causes (436).
How the antigun groups use suicide data to paper over homicide data that doesn’t support their mission.
Suicide is thus undoubtedly a huge part of the discussion when it comes to gun-related deaths in America, and few would disagree with that. The serious dispute arises only when suicides are mixed in with firearm homicides in order to present a skewed picture of “gun violence” in America.
All major gun control advocacy groups engage in this tactic. Everytown, for example, boasted on its X account that . . .
We’ve ranked all 50 states on the strength of their gun laws—and compared those rankings with each state’s rate of gun violence. The result is clear: The stronger a state’s gun safety laws, the fewer people die by gun violence.
Their ranking, of course, depends on including suicides along with homicides. Their “gun violence rate” is simply a combined total of all gun deaths in each state turned into per capita form.
Equating “gun violence” with all gun deaths seems questionable, but Everytown isn’t even the worst offender in this regard. The Violence Policy Center runs a website called Concealed Carry Killers which purports to track “killers” who had concealed carry permits, and it reports a total of 2,512 such cases since 2007.
The problem is, according to the website’s own data, over 1,400 of those “killers” were people who committed suicide without harming anyone else. (The website classifies murder-suicide in its own category). While it’s pretty shameful to insult the memory of these individuals by calling them “killers,” this is simply the most extreme example of gun control advocates using suicide statistics to make a point that homicide data alone doesn’t allow them to make.
The fact is, if these activists only compared states by gun-related homicides and excluded suicides, the data wouldn’t support their particular point of view. While there is some correlation between gun ownership rates and suicide rates, “There is no clear correlation whatsoever between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate.”
I’ve also done my own similar review of the data and found no significant correlation between the gun ownership rate of each state with that state’s specific gun-related homicide rate. Similarly, there was no correlation between a state’s Giffords Gun Control grade and its intentional homicide rate.
The response I’m usually met with when I point this out is some form of “Are you saying suicides don’t count in this discussion?” The answer is that of course suicides should count in any discussion of gun-related deaths, as they comprise most of them. But they’re not relevant to a conversation specific to “gun violence,” and are mostly not relevant to a discussion of gun control measures, for several reasons.
For one, it is completely misleading to call suicides “gun violence”, when that term makes most people think of crimes against other people, not self-harm. Moreover, while we had 27,308 gun-related suicides in 2023, we also had another 22,062 suicides that were completed via some other method.
Yet no one refers to suicide by hanging as “rope violence”, nor do they call scenarios where someone jumps to their death “bridge violence”. Most would agree those phrases would be very silly, but somehow, gun-related suicides are frequently included in “gun violence” statistics without major media outlets batting an eye.
International comparisons
There is also some evidence that guns have not dramatically increased the rate of suicide in the United States. To be sure, there is no denying that a suicide attempt with a gun is more likely to have a tragically irreversible result compared to most other methods. But international comparisons do not indicate that our suicide rate is abnormal compared to other countries according to OECD data. While the US rate of 14.1 suicides per 100,000 people is certainly on the higher end of the normal range among wealthy countries, it is still within that normal range. Our rate is below that of Japan (14.6), Belgium (15.2), and South Korea (24.1), all countries with strict gun laws. Other countries with gun laws stricter than our own are also doing only slightly better than we are on this measure, such as Australia (12.4), Sweden (12.4), and France (12.3).
Some countries may be fudging their suicide counts in other ways. For example, a government website
says that around 4,500 Canadians die from suicide each year, a rate of about 11.2 per 100,000, beating out the United States. But Canada has legalized medically-assisted suicide, and in 2023, 13,241 Canadians took advantage of that. Canada apparently doesn’t count such suicides in its official suicide rate. If it did, its rate would be around 45 per 100,000, more than three times that of the United States. We can only speculate as to how many American suicides, whether by gun or otherwise, would have been medically-assisted suicides (and thus apparently not counted) were that legal in all US states.
Returning to the topic at hand, it seems quite possible that guns are used in suicides more in the US simply because people here have more access to them, but in other countries where guns are less available, other methods are used. I don’t think anyone would argue that if all of our guns magically vanished, there wouldn’t be any drop in the suicide rate, but the international comparisons suggest that a significant amount of substitution would occur in terms of suicide methods.
Gun control groups use suicide data to inflate their statistics, but offer few solutions.
Regardless, it’s dishonest to use suicide statistics to inflate “gun violence” counts in order to pass more gun control precisely because only a very small amount of gun control does anything to address suicide. For example, Everytown rates California #1 in the country because it claims that the strength of the state’s gun laws has led to a “gun violence rate” (i.e., gun death rate) of 8.5 per 100,000, the lowest in the country. California’s gun-related homicide rate is nothing special at around 3.7 per 100,000, below that of numerous other pro-gun states like Utah (1.8), Iowa (2.3), and even the relatively impoverished West Virginia (3.5). But California’s gun-related suicide rate, the eighth lowest in the country according to the CDC’s 2023 data, leads to its low overall gun-related death rate.
Like Canada, California allows medically-assisted suicide. 884 Californians died via this method in 2023, while 4,287 total have died by it since medically-assisted suicide was legalized in 2016. These numbers are still too small to draw too many conclusions (the CDC reports a total of 4,203 suicides in California in 2023), but assisted suicide in California is increasing. We’ll see if it eventually begins to match Canada, where assisted suicides surpass “illegal” suicides.
Anyway, that California has a comparably low suicide rate is commendable, but it likely has little to do with the State’s gun control policies because very few of its many gun control laws even aim to reduce suicide. Everytown’s website commends California for a number of gun control laws, including universal background checks, concealed carry permits being required for carry, declining to implement a “Stand Your Ground” law, prohibitions on “assault weapons”, regulations of “ghost guns”, restrictions on “high capacity magazines”, limitations on where guns can be carried, and much more.
But none of those things have any bearing on suicide. Most suicidal people will pass a background check unless they have been involuntarily committed, they don’t need a carry permit to have a gun in the home, and “Stand Your Ground” laws as well as laws restricting certain rifles or magazines obviously make no difference to them harming themselves. Even the most inoffensive gun imaginable to gun control advocates, something like a double-barrel shotgun, would obviously be more than enough to carry out a suicide.
Of the long list of gun laws that Everytown applauds California for, only three could even conceivably reduce suicide: red flag laws, mental health records reporting requirements, and secure storage requirements. Assuming they actually work as intended (and I have no data to confirm that they do), red flag laws could theoretically disarm someone who is a danger to themselves, and if they aren’t determined to find some other way to harm themselves, then perhaps that can prevent a suicide. Similarly, perhaps mental health record reporting requirements may ensure some suicidal people cannot buy a gun, and again assuming that they do not substitute in another method, maybe that can prevent suicide too. Lastly, it is at least conceivable that safe storage laws can stop suicidal individuals in a household from accessing firearms owned by a family member.
I can concede that a few of the measures Everytown includes appear to have at least some chance of reducing gun-related suicide. However, Everytown lists around 40 different gun control measures that California has enacted and only a few of them can even arguably affect gun-related suicide rates. Suicides thus make up over half of Everytown’s overall “gun violence” statistics, but only a very small minority of their proposed solutions for the “gun violence” problem are relevant in any way to gun-related suicide.
Moreover, other states Everytown praises for having strong gun control laws have high suicide rates. For example, they rank Colorado as #11 in the country in terms of having the strict gun laws they champion. Similarly, the Giffords organization gives Colorado a grade of an “A-” for its gun laws. But Colorado has a very high gun-related suicide rate, the 12th highest in the nation.
Colorado’s specific record is probably due to the observed link between altitude and depression, not because of gun access. Other places have very high gun-related homicide rates, but very low gun-related suicide rates. Washington DC (which is praised by Everytown for its strict gun laws) is perhaps the most glaring example of this disparity, recording just 10 gun-related suicides in 2023, for a rate of just 1.5 per 100,000 people. But it had 211 gun-related homicides, a rate of 31.4 per 100,000.
Conclusion
Gun rights advocates should acknowledge that there’s an unfortunate correlation between gun ownership rates and suicide rates, and work to find solutions to that problem. But gun control advocates are the far more guilty party here when it comes to intellectual dishonesty. They should stop counting gun-related suicides as “gun violence.” When they include suicide data in their reporting of overall gun-death data, it should be very clear they are doing so. Finally, if the policies they are currently advocating for would have no effect on suicide, such as their frequent calls for a national “assault weapon” ban, they should omit suicide data from those discussions altogether.
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Konstadinos Moros is an Associate Attorney with Michel & Associates, a law firm in Long Beach that regularly represents the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) in its litigation efforts to restore the Second Amendment in California. You can find him on his Twitter handle @MorosKostas. To donate to CRPA or become a member, visit https://crpa.org/.
This post was adapted by SNW from a tweet posted by Konstadinos Moros.
“Gun rights advocates should acknowledge that there’s an unfortunate correlation between gun ownership rates and suicide rates”
No, as your own article points out, there’s a correlation between gun ownership and GUN suicide rate, yes, but not suicide rate in general. This has been shown LOTS of places other than here, but that you show it yourself and then still say that is… weird.
Judging by other places in the world, a massive and sudden restriction in gun availability might result in some small drop in suicide rates for a very brief period time, but in short order (if not nearly instantly), other methods would be used, instead, and plenty of those methods are both easy and effective (car in a garage, fall from high place, OD on over-the-counter meds).