Guns and Suicide: Evidence from the Israeli Defense Forces
The fact that gun ownership, and gun availability, increases suicide rates has been found over and over in epidemiological studies of various kinds. Many of those studies, however, involve multivariate statistical techniques that a lot of pro-gunners aren't familiar with and are thus suspicious of. I recently came across a study that is much simpler than that makes use of a pretty basic natural experiment -- a change in policy -- and requires hardly any knowledge of statistics at all.
It's pretty straightforward. At one point IDF changed policy, so that soldiers leave their guns on base rather than bringing them home with them over the weekend. After the change, suicide rates dropped by 40%, mostly attributed to a drop in gun suicides on weekends. In particular, there was no significant change in suicide rates during the week, so it's not the case that the timing of the policy coincided with some other change which made soldiers less suicidal overall. It was a clear case of means reduction.
of a policy change in the Israeli Defense Forces reducing adolescents’ access to
firearms on rates of suicide. Following the policy change, suicide rates decreased
significantly by 40%. Most of this decrease was due to decrease in suicide using
firearms over the weekend. There were no significant changes in rates of suicide
during weekdays. Decreasing access to firearms significantly decreases rates of
suicide among adolescents. The results of this study illustrate the ability of a relatively simple change in policy to have a major impact on suicide rates.
http://gsoa.feinheit.ch/media/medialibrary/2010/12/Lubin_10.pdf
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