Suicide in the Elderly - Comparison with United Kingdom

In the United States in 2008, 30,575 individuals committed suicide, with 57 percent using firearms or explosives. The gun suicide rate in the United States is higher than in many other nations. Scholars debate whether gun control laws would reduce the number of suicides or would simply lead to the substitution of other methods.

American men were far more likely to complete suicide than women (men represented 24,538 suicides or 80.3 percent of the total number) and far more likely to use firearms—using them in 67 percent of completed suicides. Two segments of the American population are particularly likely to commit suicide through the use of firearms: the elderly and the young. The highest suicide rate in the United States is among white men over the age of 85. Among both women and men over the age of 65, 70.9 percent of suicides involved firearms in 2008. Suicides of youths under the age of 24 involved firearms 60.7 percent of the time. It has been argued by individuals and organizations favoring gun control that the availability of firearms, particularly handguns, in the United States plays a causal role in fostering suicide. Hence, reducing the availability of firearms would result in a lower suicide rate, it is argued. However, comparison of U.S. suicide rates with the international rates of suicide published by the World Health Organization (WHO) on ninety-nine countries indicates that the suicide rate in the United States is not close to the highest in the world and that there is no apparent relationship between the relative availability of firearms in a county and its suicide rate.

The WHO data indicate that there are thirty-one (of ninety-nine) countries in which the rate of suicide for both men and women exceeds the U.S. rate (18.7 men ...