Study: More Guns Lead To More Suicides

[petronius]

22. I think it's not inconsistent, for two reasons:

First, most claims of 'more this leads to more that' have an implicit "all else being equal" attached. But nothing operates in a vacuum, and it's reasonable that if there are factors that push the rate of Outcome X upward, and factors that push the rate downward, the rate can still decline even in the presence of factors that would tend to increase it. In the case of guns, more guns really may tend to push death rates up, but that has been outweighed by factors working in the opposite direction.

More importantly, though, it's not really how many but how they're distributed. For example, ten guns owned by ten people is really no different than fifty guns owned by ten people. The OP article mentions household gun ownership rates, not total numbers of guns. Although the report is framed as 'increasing ownership increases suicide', IIRC the number of gun-containing households actually has gone down. So, a decrease in suicide (and overall death) rate would be expected according to this research...