From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:
Homicide rates in the United States have been declining for 20 years as the number of privately-held guns in the US has increased substantially.
In some states, such as New Hampshire and Oregon, which have very weak gun laws, homicide rates are remarkably low, and these states are among the safest places on earth.
As homicide rates have declined, however, and gun-related homicides with them, gun-control advocates have attempted to create a new category of “gun violence” by blaming suicides on access to guns.
Most “Gun Violence” Is Suicide
Note this recent article from The Washington Post which casts suicide as indistinguishable from homicide, and goes on to point out that there were as many firearm related deaths in 2014 as there were deaths that resulted from automobile accidents.
The article rightly notes that thanks to medical science and safety features on automobiles, deaths from car accidents have gone into steep decline in recent years. The article then notes that suicides have been increasing over the same period, but then attempts to connect this rise with access to firearms.
The article never explicitly says that suicides are indistinguishable from homicides, of course — since any rational person can see a large and obvious distinction — but it does imply the two are more or less the same by classifying both firearm-related suicides and firearm-related homicides as “gun violence.”
Employing the usual lazy methods of mainstream journalists, The Post fails to provide hard numbers or to direct links to sources, so I’ll do it for you:
To come up with this new category of “gun violence” The Post combines the CDC’s statistics of firearm suicides (a total of 21,175 in 2013) to the total of gun homicides (a total of 11,201 in 2013). Then it compares this total to the number of accidental automobile deaths, which was 33,804 in 2014. (The article claims there is new 2014 data from the CDC showing more gun deaths than automobile deaths, but the CDC web site has not been updated to reflect this.)
So, overall, as of 2013, there were 32,376 gun deaths and 33,804 automobile deaths. (During that same period, about one-third of automobile deaths were alcohol-related.)
So, yes, according to the CDC, the number of gun-related deaths and the number of automobile deaths are similar — but only if suicides are included.
Contained in all of this, however, is the implied conclusion that were it not for such easy access to guns, the suicide rate in the US would be lower. This is of course pure speculation, and rather baseless speculation at that.
To continue reading: Guns Don’t Cause Suicide
It’s not baseless speculation that guns make suicide easier. Guns make ALL forms of killing easier, which would obviously include self-killing. It’s also not an illogical assumption that restricted access to those with a verifiable history of mental problems would reduce suicide rates. But it hasn’t been studied by OUR scientists, just ones in other countries.
Congressional hypocrisy in not allowing the CDC to even study the causes of gun violence is a separate topic though. http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetstemwedel/2015/10/01/congress-still-bans-cdc-scientists-from-studying-gun-violence/
My personal experience — One person I know who attempted suicide used pills and another who unfortunately was successful used a shotgun — both were related to financial issues and with alcohol. Both persons were male and had access to a number of weapons.