By Maura Kelly, Illustration: Mary Delaware, Harvard Public Health, February 1, 2023
The gun control debate always heats up after a mass shooting, as it has in the wake of the twin shootings in California last month. The summer’s mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, finally spurred lawmakers to action with the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act bill, the first meaningful piece of gun legislation in two decades. But the U.S. gun problem is still the world’s worst, and new data shows we have a less well-known, but equally urgent reason to keep talking about gun control: suicides.
Gun homicides, including mass shootings, are a pervasive and horrific issue, and we have rightly focused attention on reducing them. But a majority of gun deaths, 54 percent, in the U.S. aren’t homicides, they’re suicides. Indeed, as the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence puts it, suicide is “the untold story of gun violence in America.”
Both suicides and gun deaths have increased over the last two decades, and there is a strong link between firearms and suicide deaths. Suicide-by-gun makes up most of both gun deaths and overall suicide deaths (over half of each).
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