IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v46y1998i9p1227-1233.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Firearm suicides and homicides in the United States: regional variations and patterns of gun ownership

Author

Listed:
  • Kaplan, Mark S.
  • Geling, Olga

Abstract

Among industrialized countries, the United States has the highest rates of firearm suicide and homicide, as well as the highest rate of gun ownership. The present study compares the differential impact of gun availability on firearm suicides and homicides in the U.S. Using data from the NCHS Mortality Detail Files (1989-1991), the 1990 U.S. census population estimates, and the General Social Surveys (1989-1991) for nine geographic divisions, we computed rates of firearm and non-firearm suicides and homicides as well as rates of gun ownership for four gender-race groups. We tested the strength of the associations between gun availability and firearm suicide and homicide rates by computing the Spearman correlation coefficients. To help elucidate the role of method substitution, we conducted similar analyses on non-firearm suicide and homicide. The results show that gun ownership has a stronger impact on firearm suicides than homicides. These findings held up after stratifying by gender and race. The study suggests that reducing the aggregate level of gun availability may decrease the risk of firearm-related deaths.

Suggested Citation

  • Kaplan, Mark S. & Geling, Olga, 1998. "Firearm suicides and homicides in the United States: regional variations and patterns of gun ownership," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 46(9), pages 1227-1233, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:46:y:1998:i:9:p:1227-1233
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(97)10051-X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. David C. Vitt & Alexander F. McQuoid & Charles Moore & Stephen Sawyer, 2018. "Trigger warning: the causal impact of gun ownership on suicide," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 50(53), pages 5747-5765, November.
    2. Philip M. Pendergast & Tim Wadsworth & Charis E. Kubrin, 2019. "Suicide in Happy Places: Is There Really a Paradox?," Journal of Happiness Studies, Springer, vol. 20(1), pages 81-99, January.
    3. Vladimir Shkolnikov & Evgeny Andreev & Zhen Zhang & James Oeppen & James Vaupel, 2011. "Losses of Expected Lifetime in the United States and Other Developed Countries: Methods and Empirical Analyses," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 48(1), pages 211-239, February.
    4. Christoph Koenig & David Schindler, 2018. "Dynamics in Gun Ownership and Crime - Evidence from the Aftermath of Sandy Hook," Bristol Economics Discussion Papers 18/694, School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK.
    5. Miller, Matthew & Hemenway, David & Azrael, Deborah, 2007. "State-level homicide victimization rates in the US in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership, 2001-2003," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 64(3), pages 656-664, February.
    6. Evans, William N. & Garthwaite, Craig & Moore, Timothy J., 2022. "Guns and violence: The enduring impact of crack cocaine markets on young black males," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 206(C).
    7. Hempstead, Dr. Katherine & Andres, Dr. Antonio Rodriguez, 2009. "Gun control and suicide: The impact of state firearm regulations, 1995-2004," MPRA Paper 20728, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Katherine Hempstead & Antonio Rodríguez, 2009. "Gun control and suicide: The impact of state firearm regulations, 1995–2004," Development Research Working Paper Series 17/2009, Institute for Advanced Development Studies.
    9. Jie Zhang & Ziyao Li, 2013. "Characteristics of Chinese rural young suicides by pesticides," International Journal of Social Psychiatry, , vol. 59(7), pages 655-662, November.
    10. Vladimir M. Shkolnikov & Evgeny M. Andreev & Zhen Zhang & James E. Oeppen & James W. Vaupel, 2009. "Losses of expected lifetime in the US and other developed countries: methods and empirical analyses," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2009-042, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    11. Wolfgang Stroebe, 2014. "Firearm possession and violent death: A critical review," CREMA Working Paper Series 2014-07, Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:46:y:1998:i:9:p:1227-1233. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.