When Americans think about deaths from guns, we tend to focus on homicides. But the problem of gun suicide is inescapable: More than 60 percent of people in this country who die from guns die by suicide.
Suicide gets a lot less attention than murders for a few reasons. One big one is that news organizations generally don’t cover suicides the way they do murders. There’s evidence that news attention around suicide can lead to more suicides. Suicide is more stigmatized and less discussed than homicide.
But, as a matter of public health, gun suicides are a huge problem in the United States. Suicide is the second-most common cause of death for Americans between 15 and 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Across all ages, it is the 10th-most common cause of death, and caused 1.6 percent of all deaths in 2012.
[For more of this story, written by Margot Sanger-Katz, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10...tntemail0=y&_r=0]
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