So a lot of people know that the U.S. has a lot of gun deaths.
We had over 33,000 in 2013.
But not a lot of people know that the majority of those, two thirds of those, are suicides.
Most public attention on guns focuses on these big mass shootings.
I don't want to minimize these tragedies, they're horrible.
But, I do think press coverage of this can obscure the actual nature of the gun problem
in America.
The overwhelming majority of people who die because of guns in the U.S. don't die because
someone shot them, they die because they shot themselves.
The U.S. owns more guns per resident than any other country in the world. Yeah, there
is about one gun for every person in America.
We own more than Switzerland which requires people to have guns in their houses as members
of militias to defend the country.
For comparison people often talk about Canada that also has a big gun culture. But, we have
almost three times as many guns as Canada per capita.
Public health people who are concerned about suicide are really really concerned about
access to guns.
About 6-7% of attempts involving poisoning or cutting/slashing your wrists -- only
6-7% of those attempts succeed.
Whereas the rate of success if you try to kill yourself with a gun is over 90%.
The most dangerous myth people have about suicide is that it's inevitable. Suicides
are usually impulsive actions.
They're decided within minutes or hours, or less than a day before the attempt.
People can be talked down from them which makes the method that they choose to attempt
extremely important.
There have been a bunch of interventions that suggest pretty strongly that reducing people's
access to guns reduces suicide rates.
There was a case in Israel where the Israeli Defense Force instituted a policy whereby
soldiers couldn't bring their guns home on the weekend.
And they found that firearm suicides dropped by 40%.
Similarly, Australia instituted a massive gun buy back in 1996 that took about a fifth
of the country's guns, and there is evidence suggesting a truly massive decrease in suicides
after that.
If someone told you that there was a pollutant in your house that was killing 21,000 people
a year, you would want to do something about it.
It�s worth asking ourselves if guns are that kind of pollutant and if so, what we�re
gonna do about it.