Study: More Guns Lead To More Suicides [View all]

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Source: Think Progress

A new study, coauthored by a libertarian-aligned economist, has found strong evidence that the spread of gun ownership around the United States is a threat to public health. Guns, this research suggests, really do cause people to kill themselves when they wouldn’t otherwise.

Gun research is often unfairly tarred as “biased” liberal hackwork, but Alex Tabarrok, one of the study’s two authors, isn’t anyone’s idea of a progressive. Tabarrok teaches at George Mason University, a famously libertarian-inclined economics department. He’s a fellow at the libertarian Mercatus Institute and one of the lead authors of Marginal Revolution, one of the web’s most famous libertarian-inclined blogs.

Tabarrok and his coauthor, Justin Briggs, put together a bunch of data on gun ownership and suicide. After controlling for a series of potentially confounding factors, Tabarrok and Briggs ran a series of regressions to establish any links between guns and suicides.

Their results were staggering. “We find strong, positive effects of gun prevalence on suicide,” they write — and how. “A 1% increase in the household gun ownership rate,” Tabarrok explains in a Marginal Revolution post, “leads to a .5 to .9% increase in suicides.”


Read more: http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/11/14/2945661/study-guns-suicides/