U.S. Gun Death Rate Jumps 17 Percent Since 2008 Supreme Court District of Columbia v. Heller

The homicide rate in Washington DC fell from 31.5 to 20.4 from 2008 to 2016 according to FBI UCR data. That's a decline of 35% in the only locale that was actually affected by Heller.

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/dccrime.htm

 

There is nothing provided to suggest the Heller ruling made any difference in the matter, as there is no evidence that the increase is attributed to those that are legally able to own firearms.

 

There's some spin in that article, a little mixing of apples and oranges. First it says "Nationwide, the overall gun death rate (suicides, homicides, and unintentional shootings) increased from 10.21 per 100,000 in 2009 (the year after the Heller decision) to 11.96 per 100,000 in 2016" then, as you point out, it says "The increase in the overall firearm death rate was driven largely by firearm homicides, which increased by 10.4 percent (from a rate of 4.04 per 100,000 in 2015 to 4.46 per 100,000 in 2016)."

It's true that 0.42 is a 10.4% increase of 4.04 but notice that it doesn't give the actual suicide numbers, but only mentions suicide went up 3.6% over the same time period of 2015 to 2016. Why the obscuration? Because suicide in America is both shockingly high and on the rise, but constitutes the highest percentage of "gun deaths". If the anti-gun lobby focused more on mental health services rather than banning guns, perhaps they'd actually save more lives.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/health/us-suicide-rate-surges-to-a-30-year-high.html

Spoiler: Suicide Rate Surges

Suicide in the United States has surged to the highest levels in nearly 30 years, a federal data analysis has found, with increases in every age group except older adults. The rise was particularly steep for women. It was also substantial among middle-aged Americans, sending a signal of deep anguish from a group whose suicide rates had been stable or falling since the 1950s.

The suicide rate for middle-aged women, ages 45 to 64, jumped by 63 percent over the period of the study, while it rose by 43 percent for men in that age range, the sharpest increase for males of any age. The overall suicide rate rose by 24 percent from 1999 to 2014, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, which released the study on Friday.

The increases were so widespread that they lifted the nation’s suicide rate to 13 per 100,000 people, the highest since 1986. The rate rose by 2 percent a year starting in 2006, double the annual rise in the earlier period of the study. In all, 42,773 people died from suicide in 2014, compared with 29,199 in 1999.

A Growing, Widespread Toll
From 1999 to 2014, suicide rates in the United States rose among most age groups. Men and women from 45 to 64 had a sharp increase. Rates fell among those age 75 and older.

“It’s really stunning to see such a large increase in suicide rates affecting virtually every age group,” said Katherine Hempstead, senior adviser for health care at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, who has identified a link between suicides in middle age and rising rates of distress about jobs and personal finances.

Researchers also found an alarming increase among girls 10 to 14, whose suicide rate, while still very low, had tripled. The number of girls who killed themselves rose to 150 in 2014 from 50 in 1999. “This one certainly jumped out,” said Sally Curtin, a statistician at the center and an author of the report.

American Indians had the sharpest rise of all racial and ethnic groups, with rates rising by 89 percent for women and 38 percent for men. White middle-aged women had an increase of 80 percent.

The rate declined for just one racial group: black men. And it declined for only one age group: men and women over 75.

The data analysis provided fresh evidence of suffering among white Americans. Recent research has highlighted the plight of less educated whites, showing surges in deaths from drug overdoses, suicides, liver disease and alcohol poisoning, particularly among those with a high school education or less. The new report did not break down suicide rates by education, but researchers who reviewed the analysis said the patterns in age and race were consistent with that recent research and painted a picture of desperation for many in American society.

“This is part of the larger emerging pattern of evidence of the links between poverty, hopelessness and health,” said Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard and the author of “Our Kids,” an investigation of new class divisions in America.

The rise in suicide rates has happened slowly over many years. Federal health researchers said they chose 1999 as the start of the period they studied because it was a low point in the national suicide rate and they wanted to cover the full period of its recent sustained rise.

The federal health agency’s last major report on suicide, released in 2013, noted a sharp increase in suicide among 35- to 64-year-olds. But the rates have risen even more since then — up by 7 percent for the entire population since 2010, the end of the last study period — and federal researchers said they issued the new report to draw attention to the issue.

Policy makers say efforts to prevent suicide across the country are spotty. While some hospitals and health systems screen for suicidal thinking and operate good treatment programs, many do not.

“We have more and more effective treatments, but we have to figure out how to bake them into health care systems so they are used more automatically,” said Dr. Jane Pearson, chairwoman of the National Institute of Mental Health’s Suicide Research Consortium, which oversees the National Institutes of Health funding for suicide prevention research. “We’ve got bits and pieces, but we haven’t really put them all together yet.”

She noted that while N.I.H. funding for suicide prevention projects had been relatively flat — rising to $25 million in 2016 from $22 million in 2012 — it was a small fraction of funding for research of mental illnesses, including mood disorders like depression.

The new federal analysis noted that the methods of suicide were changing. About one in four suicides in 2014 involved suffocation, which includes hanging and strangulation, compared with fewer than one in five in 1999. Suffocation deaths are harder to prevent because nearly anyone has access to the means, Ms. Hempstead said. And while the share of suicides involving guns declined — guns went from being involved in 37 percent of female suicides to 31 percent, and from 62 percent to 55 percent for men — the total number of gun suicides increased..

The question of what has driven the increases is unresolved, leaving experts to muse on the reasons.

Julie Phillips, a professor of sociology at Rutgers who has studied suicide among middle-aged Americans, said social changes could be raising the risks. Marriage rates have declined, particularly among less educated Americans, while divorce rates have risen, leading to increased social isolation, she said. She calculated that in 2005, unmarried middle-aged men were 3.5 times more likely than married men to die from suicide, and their female counterparts were as much as 2.8 times more likely to kill themselves. The divorce rate has doubled for middle-aged and older adults since the 1990s, she said.

Disappointed expectations of social and economic well-being among less educated white men from the baby-boom generation may also be playing a role, she said. They grew up in an era that valued “masculinity and self-reliance” — characteristics that could get in the way of asking for help.

“It appears this group isn’t seeking help but rather turning to self-destructive means of dealing with their despair,” Professor Phillips said.

Another possible explanation: an economy that has eaten away at the prospects of families on the lower rungs of the income ladder.

Dr. Alex Crosby, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he had studied the association between economic downturns and suicide going back to the 1920s and found that suicide was highest when the economy was weak. One of the highest rates in the country’s modern history, he said, was in 1932, during the Great Depression, when the rate was 22.1 per 100,000, about 70 percent higher than in 2014.

“There was a consistent pattern,” he said, which held for all ages between 25 and 64. “When the economy got worse, suicides went up, and when it got better, they went down.”

But other experts pointed out that the unemployment rate had been declining in the latter period of the study, and questioned how important the economy was to suicide.

The gap in suicide rates for men and women has narrowed because women’s rates are increasing faster than men’s. But men still kill themselves at a rate 3.6 times that of women. Though suicide rates for older adults fell over the period of the study, men over 75 still have the highest suicide rate of any age group — 38.8 per 100,000 in 2014, compared with just four per 100,000 for their female counterparts.

FWIW, the "Violence Policy Center" was founded and run by Josh Sugermann, a former key leader of the National Coalition to Ban Handguns. They are strongly anti-gun and have been known to both spin and fabricate data to fluff up their arguments to ban or restrict guns.

http://articles.latimes.com/1986-03-24/local/me-118_1_handgun-industry
Josh Sugarmann is communications director for the Washington-based National Coalition to Ban Handguns.

https://bearingarms.com/bob-o/2014/...caught-fabricating-anti-gun-data-again-still/

Spoiler: [/I]VPC-Sugarmann fabricates data[I]

The head of the Violence Policy Center had precisely one reporter (me) ask a question during his pre-NRA Annual Meeting spin-fest, and that question was to ask why he continued to lie with his poorly-researched (actually, “fabricated” would be a more accurate term) continuing propaganda report, “Concealed Carry Killers.”

John Lott provided that data I used that nailed Sugarmann to the wall:

Spoiler: [/I]VPC-Sugarmann fabricates data[I]

The Violence Policy Center regularly puts out these bogus charges in a report called “Concealed Carry Killers.” But how does it claim to arrive at these numbers?

The VPC collects cases of permit holders’ abusing their permitted concealed handguns for each state. For Michigan, for example, it cites state-police reports on permit holders indicating that 185 died from suicide during the period 2007 through 2012. Surely some alarm bells should have gone off, with Michigan suicides supposedly making up 29 percent of all 636 deaths nationwide the VPC attributed to permitted concealed handguns.

But more importantly, the suicides are not in any meaningful way linked to the issue of carrying a permitted concealed handgun outside of one’s home. If you look at page 2 in the latest report from the Michigan State Police, you will see that in the listing of suicides, there is no indication of specific cause of death. The report merely notes that 56 permit holders committed suicide, without saying whether any or all of them used a gun. Interestingly, the suicide rate among permit holders in Michigan in 2010 (13.3 per 100,000 permit holders) is lower than the rate in the general adult population (16.30). But typically suicides — with or without guns — take place at home. So, again, what would these numbers have to do with the concealed-carry debate?​

Yes, Sugarmann is cooking the books by attempting to claim concealed carry is responsible for in-home suicides, as utterly absurd as the claim is to even the most casual observer.

Of course, this is nothing new. VPC’s propaganda—there is no way to credibly call what they produce “research”—is so bad that they’ve even “killed” people that never died to increase bogus numbers.

As noted above, Sugarmann’s most recent batch of lies were exposed by John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC). If you value the visceral delight in watching dishonest propagandists like Josh Sugarmann, Shannon Watts, and other liberty control cultists exposed, I’d suggest becoming part of the real grassroots by donating to the CPRC’s fundraising drive.

The more data we have that proves the worth of an armed society, the faster we’ll take back our Second Amendment rights from those astroturfed groups that seek to deny us our rights.

 

So bleeping what?? In any discussion of improving public safety if you want to propose gun control that's fine. Part of the legitimate discussion is delving into the idea that there are things OTHER than gun control that just might be more effective!

 

Why do you think so many want gun restrictions? It's so they can commit crimes without fear of being shot. They can really put the pressure on the weak. The police cannot protect you. They can arrest someone after a crime is committed and put tape up for investigators. They can't be everywhere they need to be. It isn't their fault. Folks are so short sited. I'm ashamed to realize some of them are helping run our country.

 

If they keep folks home out of fear for their safety, delivery services will rise to an all time high and expense.

 

And still completely unrelated to the court decision mentioned in the title.

Because, as we all know, correlation does not prove causation.

 

Only if suicide is counted.

 

The VPC didn't use primary data sources, so I'm doubtful. Find a real source, not VPC. As I usually say, I would not insult you with using NRA sources, don't insult me by using the VPC.

 

Because they want the state to have a monopoly on force.

 

According to the VPC, a firearm is used in self defense >2x more often than to commit suicide, and >8x more often than to commit murder.

 

They have proven they don't have any citizen's safety in mind. They don't care about the public, only tax dollars, votes and their pensions. They care about lobbyists who offer them millions of dollars, but not the interests of "the people". Academia has ruined the youth of this country.

 

the VPC is one of the most deceitful groups in the USA

 

Oh look.

Another lie based on the lie of suicide statistics.

 

Are you less dead in a suicide?

 

Suicides are not an issue involving firearms as in a causal relationship, since there are many ways to commit suicide, firearms are not the number one method of suicide, and suicide existed long before practical firearms that could be used in suicide existed.

People commit suicide in Prisons and Jails, Countries without Guns like Japan, or Countries and States with very strict Gun Control, the U.K. have many suicides.

Finally, given the complex issues revolving around suicide, it is not merely a mental health issue, it encompasses socio-economic issues as well as idiosyncratic and other socialization issues, relationship issues, far too complex to cure by simply more gun control while not addressing the real issues surrounding suicide.

 

Yes there are many ways to reduce suicides. Gun control is one of them

 

Suicides are not relevant and will not be discussed outside of a dedicated topic of such a subject.

 

What is not being stated by yourself, is that the proposed ways of reducing suicides are failures and have no merit. Simply because something is a way does not mean it actually leads to a destination. Sometimes the way is nothing more than a dead end.

 

In this case gun control saves lives

 

Such does not, otherwise it would not be claimed that better firearm-related restrictions are needed.

 

No, when guns are not available, people still commit suicide, the numbers remain unabated and unrelated in any substantial manner to firearms availability by regions and countries and nations.

In fact, it is far simpler to use a simple inexpensive medical method, using easy to obtain veterinary medications, very effective.

Also, there is a type of humane horse euthanasia captured piston device, very popular in the U.K. and not regulated.

Just too many non firearms suicide methods to keep falsely claiming gun control reduces suicides.

 

Yet studies show gun control reduces suicides

 

Studies make the claim that such may be a possibility, but they do not show that the claim is either factual or conclusive. At best it is hypothetical speculation. At worst it is intellectual dishonesty.

 

17 percent is huge. Reducing gun control seems to lead to more gun deaths