Effect of firearms legislation on suicide and homicide in Canada from 1981 to 2016

At first I thought, "great, another Fraser Institute study that everyone dismisses due to their right-wing bias".... But then I saw:


Caillin Langmann
Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
Affiliation Department of Medicine, Division of Emergency Medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
ORCID logo http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2358-2958

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. None of the authors are members of any organization other than the indicated University appointment at McMaster University Canada, as well as the Professional Organizations: Fellow of the Royal College of Medicine Canada and American Board of Emergency Medicine. There are no competing interests in this group.
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And was surprised. The study really puts a hole in the rhetoric.

Like always, the limitations of studies should always be known:

This study has several limitations. Data for suicide could not be disaggregated by age and Province/Territory due to small numbers, Statistics Canada could not release the data under confidentiality regulations, thus regional associations could not be analysed. Another issue is that firearm suicide and homicide are low base-rate events, and therefore changes in response to specific interventions may not have the statistical power necessary to resolve using regression models. Bias may also result from the misclassification of cause of death by coroners. While it is not possible to determine the number of accidental deaths misclassified as suicide or vice versa, the numbers of accidental deaths by firearms and suffocation per age category are in the low single digit ranges in data obtainable from Statistics Canada.
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... There was no association found with firearm prevalence rates per province and provincial suicide rates, but an increased association with suicide rates was found with rates of low income, increased unemployment
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and
In conclusion, firearms legislation had no associated beneficial effect on overall suicide and homicide rates. Prevalence of firearms ownership was not associated with suicide rates.
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Bingo

Expect the author and this paper to be shredded starting any moment.
 
^exactly this. I have seen people in this state, gun...bridge...carbon monoxide...pills. if someone wants to go they want to go. Method has no association with cause. Human beings have a right to control their own life or death, we have the legal right to assisted suicide. The only reason any government body would inquire or intervene.....loss of tax revenue.
 
maifire said:
Suicide should be way more legal regardless. Access to guns or not, suicide is near impossible to stop. What we can stop is the horrible ways in which some believe they should do it, or try and screw it up.
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Making it a no big deal event, is likely not the best course of action.

I see where you are coming from...

There are some stats from Bridge jumpers...apparently quite a few instantly regretted jumping...but just managed to survive, and get a second chance.
 
Thanks CSC for bringing this to our attention. An interesting read.

Some ridiculous assumptions made in this study. For example:

Since all firearms owners in Canada have been required to hold a license since 2001, it is possible to use that data as a proxy for the availability of firearms per person. It has been hypothesized that increased availability of firearms increases the rate of firearms suicide and therefore overall suicide due to the high lethality of that method [14]. This is the first study to examine the prevalence of firearms and suicide in Canada using licensing as a proxy for availability. A regression model was created to test that relationship.
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Since when has the number of FACs or PALs/RPALs been a good predictor of 'availability of firearms' in Canada? This stat will come as small comfort to the families of victims in the recent NS shooting and most other multiple shootings and instances of gun-related gang violence, where the perpetrators are using black-market / smuggled guns.
 
eldercanuck said:
Thanks CSC for bringing this to our attention. An interesting read.

Some ridiculous assumptions made in this study. For example:



Since when has the number of FACs or PALs/RPALs been a good predictor of 'availability of firearms' in Canada? This stat will come as small comfort to the families of victims in the recent NS shooting and most other multiple shootings and instances of gun-related gang violence, where the perpetrators are using black-market / smuggled guns.
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Since they were specifically trying to focus on the effects of firearms legislation on suicide.

Also, last I checked it wasn't 22 people committing mass suicide in NS.
 
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