The Baltimore Sun
Several studies have linked gun ownership to the risk of suicide by firearm, according to Dr. Matthew Miller, the new study's lead author from the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.
But some critics question whether people living in states where lots of residents own guns are inherently more suicidal than those who live in places where ownership is less common.
To address that critique, Miller and his colleagues gathered state-by-state data on gun ownership, suicide attempts and suicide deaths from a variety of sources, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and health surveys.
They compared the 16 states with the highest gun ownership rates to the six states with the lowest rates. Both of those groups included about 62 million people.
In the high gun ownership group, 51 percent of adults lived in a household with firearms, versus 15 percent of adults in the low gun ownership group.
There were about 7,300 firearm suicides in the states with the most guns - including Alabama, Montana and West Virginia - in 2008 to 2009, according to findings published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
That compared to 1,700 suicides by gun in the low ownership states, such as Hawaii, Massachusetts and New York.
The number of non-gun suicides in the two sets of states was similar, at about 4,200 and 4,300, respectively. What's more, state-wide rates of suicide attempts did not differ based on levels of household gun ownership.
This reminds me of one of our favorite posts about guns and women. The universal truth prevails: where there are more guns there are more problems. In other words, guns do more harm than good.