The Incidental Economist

From the abstract:
“States in the highest quartile of legislative strength (scores of ≥9) had a lower overall firearm fatality rate than those in the lowest quartile (scores of ≤2) (absolute rate difference, 6.64 deaths/100 000/y; age-adjusted incident rate ratio [IRR], 0.58; 95% CI, 0.37-0.92). Compared with the quartile of states with the fewest laws, the quartile with the most laws had a lower firearm suicide rate (absolute rate difference, 6.25 deaths/100 000/y; IRR, 0.63; 95% CI, 0.48-0.83) and a lower firearm homicide rate (absolute rate difference, 0.40 deaths/100 000/y; IRR, 0.60; 95% CI, 0.38-0.95).”

It seems the highest quartile had 6.64 more gun deaths per 100,000 peron years than the lowest quartile. 6.25 per 100,000 of those deaths were gun-related suicides. 0.4 of the deaths were firearm homicides.

Haven’t read the full paper, but I’d be interested to see if non-firearm suicide rates were much higher in the lowest quartile. I guess if someone is going to attempt suicide, though, we’d rather they did it via non-firearms means, as they would then be more likely to survive the attempted suicide and potentially receive rehabilitative treatement to get them off the suicide path.

If N people attempt suicide via firearm, and N people attempt suicide via non-firearm methods, how will the survival rates compare?