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by ryeights 2383 days ago
> Suicides accounting for the large majority of “gun deaths,” but bans on semi-automatic rifles and high capacity magazines will have little effect on suicides. Likely red flag laws as well.

At the risk of sounding grim, if you're looking to commit suicide, a 12-gauge shotgun (very common for bird hunting) is probably your best bet. Nobody's looking to ban those.
2 comments
kasey_junk 2383 days ago
It’s actually likely an inverse relationship to this. Suicides are more likely to be successful where guns are prevalent compared to where they are hard to get. Meanwhile homicides are rare so no matter what tool you have access to you can get it done.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/guns-and-suicide/

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ryeights 2383 days ago
To be clear, I agree with that assessment. My point is that banning standard capacity magazines and semiautomatic rifles will have little effect on suicide rates, since they aren't a very good choice for committing suicide in the first place.
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vorpalhex 2383 days ago
The US and UK suicide rates are extremely comparable, and the UK has far fewer firearms. Let's not even touch on Japan.
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kasey_junk 2383 days ago
No they aren’t. Most recent data suggests that the US has twice the suicide rate of the U.K.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide...

Japan & Korea are interesting _because_ they are outliers.

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vorpalhex 2383 days ago
The US suicide rate per the CDC is 14/100k (2017). The UK suicide rate is 11/100k per the office of National statistics (2018).

I'm not sure why the Wikipedia page dramatically disagrees with the UK's own stats.

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nl 2383 days ago
The Wikipedia page uses WHO data, which is age-standardised. It's unclear if this explains the entire difference.

The WHO explanation is here: https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr... and their data is here: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.MHSUICIDEASDR?lang=en

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drchap 2383 days ago
According your source in 2016 the US suicide rate was 13.7 per 100,000 people. The UK was 7.6, so about half.

But, France was 12.1 and Ireland 10.9, not much less than the US. I don't think we can conclude from this data that access to firearms accounts for all or even most of the difference.

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virmundi 2383 days ago
Even then there is 15% chance of failure. Best option is a really tall building in the middle of a city far away from a body of water. That way there is less chance of your corpse being eaten by crawfish and crabs and birds.
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