More suicide information

I'm involved in a conversation on the Brady Campaign Facebook site about gun control and suicide. I made a comment about the declining murder rate and Andrew Goddard pointed out that I didn't include suicides with my 'gun death' numbers. I responded that suicide is independent of method and pointed out that Canada's suicide rate is similar to that of the United States, but the US has three times more firearms. Facebooker (yeah, I made that up) Brent Gurtek was interested in more information regarding the changes in the suicide rate in Canada compared with the changes in Canada's gun laws. If I did all that research, I may as well write a post about it. I'm surprised that my posts have been allowed to stay as long as they have (nearly 24 hours) except for links that I provided for the FBI Uniform Crime reports, those were deleted. Anywho....

From Statistics Canada we get the actual number of persons that committed suicide. Doing the math, with their estimated population, we see that the suicide rate in Canada rising. US suicide rate is from the CDC.

Now, let's compare their rising suicide rates with their gun laws.

Suicide, gun ownership and rates

The anti-rights establishment has set a metric, or a unit of measurement, of violence in the United States. They call it 'gun death' while turning a blind eye to the rest of the violent crime. In this unit of measurement they count suicide by gun and claim "30,000 people are killed every year by guns". A more honest statement would be that 30,000 people are killed every year by being shot, either by themselves or by someone else. The antis claim that having a gun in the home increases the risk of suicide 90% - 460%. (Wow, that's a huge spectrum from 90 - 460).