teen suicides homes with gun ownership increase
courtesy Michigan Education Association

They do enjoy pushing these statistics with their own unique interpretation and twist on reality:

Youth suicides happen more often in U.S. states with high rates of household gun ownership, a recent study found.

In the 10 states with the highest youth suicide rates, 53 percent of households owned guns. In the 10 states with the lowest youth suicide rates, only 20 percent of households owned guns, according to the study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Wait, what?

Higher levels of household gun ownership were associated with higher rates of overall youth suicide – not necessarily suicide by firearm, the research team found.

– Ankur Banerjee for Rock947, More Youth Suicides Seen in States with High Gun Ownership Rates

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face: the mental health care system is broken. It isn’t about the method of suicide, people, it’s about the mental status of the person in question.

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70 COMMENTS

  1. “Researchers: Rising and Setting of Moon and Sun Tied to More Youth Suicides – Only Not with Guns”

  2. “Higher levels of household gun ownership were associated with higher rates of overall youth suicide – not necessarily suicide by firearm, the research team found.”

    What is a spurious relationship for $1000 Alex

  3. This study was a waste of money, probably Taxpayer’s money. The researcher(s) should be barred from receiving any Federal grant money in the future. And give back what they have already stolen.

    • “Data on gun ownership, suicide risk factors and suicide rates, respectively, came from the 2004 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, in which a representative sample of adults in each state were interviewed by telephone; the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, an in-school survey administered every odd year to a representative sample of youth in ninth through 12th grades in each state; and from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Vital Statistics program.”

      • What occupation has the highest suicide rates? Law enforcement. Why? They are mostly alpha males, told to lock down their emotions, and someone teaches them how to solve problems with guns.
        Gun owners tend to be self reliant, problem solvers, and decisive. When they decide the problem is best solved by killing themselves, they are more likely competent to get the job done.
        Everyone has problems. Emos just whine them, alphas solve them, right way or wrong.

  5. Were these suicides even in households with guns? Maybe the 53% of those households who (admit to) own(ing) guns are happy and content and it’s the 47% who are depressed because they don’t have any guns? Maybe rural areas have more guns and more suicides and urban areas have fewer guns and more murders? Maybe somebody was talking out of their ass and got high on the fumes? Inquiring minds want to know.

    • Alaska
      South Dakota
      Wyoming
      Montana
      New Mexico
      North Dakota
      Idaho
      Colorado
      Utah
      Oklahoma

      I have been to 9 of the top 6 states, I love visiting, but I would likely kill myself too if I had to live there. (Not really, but never planning on moving there if I can help it, with the exception of Colorado). Never been to Utah.

      • Not only rural but mostly cold and with a high aboriginal American population. Probably high rate of alcoholism too. And I’m guessing wide swaths of territory with no cell service or high speed internet. Variables abound.

        • They actual took into account the venerable between rural and urban. Urban was actually a tick higher. But the study was honest at the end were they are calling for a study to address those issues.

          “Because this is a cross-sectional study, this does not necessarily imply that changes in gun ownership over time within a state translate into changes in youth suicide rates. A panel study with multi-year data would be necessary to explore the within-state effects of gun ownership.”

          I think the biggest takeaway is that New York and the surrounding states take kids mental health more seriously than most.

      • the states with the highest suzy-sideways problem have ONE THING IN COMMON ,,,THEY ARE ALL DEMOCRAP. WANT TO FIX IT???? OUTLAW DEMOCRATS AND CHEMICAL ENHANCED KIDS.. THAT WILL FIX THE PROBLEM….

    • Maybe rural areas have a higher suicide rate because of the lack of employment opportunities and support services.

      You would have to be very depressed to want to get high with homemade meth made from cold tablets, cleaning products, and the lithium strip from a battery.

      • The “Daily Commute”! I know people that Travel two or three hours joust to get to work, and none of them are “Suicidal Prone”…

  6. One might question why this “study” was undertaken in the first place. Boston U? I’m fairly certain it relied on a certain amount of US Gov’t subsidy funding.

    Perhaps “the researchers” should now study the effects of no father in the home on youth suicide rates. And on teen pregnancy, gang activity, school drop-out rates, lack of employability, a criminal record, violence in general, “need” for Ritalin, inability to even use a shovel or hammer- you get the picture…

    It can also be proven that 100% of people who have ever drunk water will die. BFD.

  7. “We face a bleak future wherein more and more “facts” are manufactured from grasping at straws to verify a preconceived conclusion. The Left has been there a long while already and this Medieval Methodology has become a mental pandemic for which Truth is no remedy.”

    • “…this Medieval Methodology has become a mental pandemic for which Truth is no remedy.”

      Evil will always win….until one day it doesn’t – forever

  8. Cheese consumption is also correlated to dying by getting tangled up in your bedsheets. Ban cheese.

  9. I thought the narrative was gun ownership going down? If the idea is that the lower the gun ownership rate correlates to a lower suicide rate, and the lowest suicide rated states have 20% of homes with gun ownership, then the whole idea that gun ownership is a minuscule percentage of the population is garbage.

    • “…then the whole idea that gun ownership is a minuscule percentage of the population is garbage.”

      a key principle of “research” is to define the range of interpretations that are unacceptable, then construct the data mining so as to eliminate those unacceptable interpretations. in other words, focus on minutiae to the exclusion of recognition of the larger environment in which the research subject exists (“the big picture”) – especially those scientific findings you reported earlier that negate your new findings.

    • Mississippi does not have a suicide problem like the top 10 States. Maybe the commitment to youth programs has something to do with it.

      • That is my opinion. Although, I’m certain the gungrabbers would accuse us of raising a generation of trained killers.

  11. The researchers don’t claim a causal relationship between gun density and suicide rates. I’d guess there’s a similar relationship between suicide and states with the highest meth use as well. Bias in any statistical study is usually seen when the findings don’t specifically state that “correlation doesn’t mean causation.”

  12. My LGBTSGHQPHMF soul mate dissed me on Facebook forgive me for stealing the tide pods and 1/5th of Vodka parents, I had no choice. But Dad you can rot in hell because you didn’t see my inner self and forced me to learn to tie my shoes and shoot your yucky gunn

    • “My LGBTSGHQPHMF soul mate dissed me on Facebook forgive me for stealing the tide pods and 1/5th of Vodka parents, I had no choice.”

      Possum, whatever you’re smoking, can I have some from your bag?

      Because that is obviously some *seriously* good shit… 😉

  13. Water causes suicide and is fatal 100% of the time.
    Everyone who commits suicide has drank water. Everyone who drank water is dead or will eventually die.
    Now where is my grant money?

    • “Now where is my grant money?”

      You don’t get grant money for research already completed an published.

  14. OK here is the Zinger. I’m waiting for your response Kate, it going to be fun.

    “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face: the mental health care system is broken. It isn’t about the method of suicide, people, it’s about the mental status of the person in question.”

    1 point you did not quote was that gun ownership also resulted in a HIGHER rate of attempts being successful.

    But the biggest take away I got from this is that gun owners as a whole, are less successful at providing for the mental health of their kids.

    However, the biggest single issue with this study is that they need to look at the suicide rates between gun owners and non owners in the same narrow population samples.

    And next time link the actual study
    https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(18)32383-3/fulltext

    • And they admit the issues with it being a cross-sectional study (geographic location). So they realize that is a glaring weakness of the study.

      ” The most significant difference between these two states across the indicators tested is that Illinois had a household gun ownership rate of 20.7%, whereas Iowa had a household gun ownership rate of 45.7%.”

      Somehow the study concludes that the only difference between Iowa and Illinois is gun ownership. And before everyone bashes Illinois, our suicide rate for kids is much lower. I also know from personal experience that teen suicide was take / is taken very seriously. I don’t know what it is like in other states as I have not been a teen, nor needed to take care of one in another state.

  15. There’s typhus in S F, measles coming back around, tuberculosis, and occasionally plague. There’s antibiotic-resistant super bugs, mutated into Andromeds Strains in hospitals. Then there’s the herd of lifestyle diseases that would count as pandemics by the stats, growing in number, and intensity, and reach. Sickle cell anemia, various gene-marked cancers, and construction defects declared at birth are still with us.

    That’s all first world. Don’t get me started on malaria and parasites in places with less infrastructure.

    Last year’s flu was badly vaccinated, with the highest death rate in years. This year is also a mess, strain-wise, with less severe symptoms, so far.

    I’d like to say that Doctors Doing Anything But Their Jobs shun these direct, consequential problems because they are hard. But, it’s worse than that. They do the posturing because it’s a cheap, easy path to pseudo-relevance.

    It’s worse, even, than that. Preventing Doctors, there, field promoted themselves from players to refs, not preventing anything but rather sitting on the sidelines keeping score n throwing flags. Who’s doing the work? Not them.

    But, it’s worse, still. There’s no game, only Calvin Ball warped into Zebra Ball, where the rules are only “you lose”, declared by people not on the field. And requiring a fee crom the players for the service.

    There is an epidemic, a plague we need to see, n stop, of self-appointed hall monitors giving themselves field promotions into telling the rest of us what to do. When you own the results, you have to be way better than vague maybe-correlations that always seem to tie to something *those people* do.

    So, Docs, go ahead and propose how we get less kid suicides. How we gonna do that? How do we know it worked? How will we know it’s the best thing? What can you do for us on this … that works, that solves our problem vs enriching you?

    Go ahead and do some disease prevention. We’ll watch the numbers to see how you do.

    Any resemblence to the last few decades’ civilian disarmament scam is just a coincidence, I am sure.

    • To be fair, every time I see a Nicolas Cage movie I think, “this kind of crappy acting could send a less emotionally stable person than me over the edge”. So there might actually be something to that chart.

  19. Not even a weak correlation. But It laughably offers more “science” than the vast majority of pharmaceutical industry performed/financed vaccine “safety” studies.

  20. BULLSHIT, THIS IS JUST MORE COMMUNIST/DEMONCRAP HORSE-HSIT FOR PROPAGANDA TO THE UN-WASHED MINIONS. …FEED THEM BULLSHIT AND MAKE THEM MUSHROOMS..

  21. The thing is that both gun ownership correlates with things like a rural population and low population density, which correlates with lower access to mental health care and greater social isolation, which correlates with higher rates of suicide.

    Most studies about suicide and guns rely on this correlation and do their utmost to hide it. I guess these guys didn’t get the memo.

  22. Kids have a need to conform with groups of other kids or they are branded “weird”. The “weird” ones are fair game to be bullied by other kids. Making a friend with the enemy (anyone with power over them, like teachers, cops, ministers) is the kiss of death. Forcing a kid to stay out of his society is enough to make some of them to choose suicide. Kids in small towns who are “weird” have no other “weirds” to hang with, so they are at more danger of suicide.
    Kids need their peers’ approval, take that away – by forcing “different” clothes, severe haircuts, the parent saying to them, “all those kids are just jealous” or some such, just reinforces their differentness.

  23. Could this reflect the ongoing cultural war by the media, progressives and teachers against what used to be considered “good” American values- family, home, abstinence from drugs, heterosexuality, work, God? It’s our youth who bear the brunt of the Left’s assault on traditional American values and I would suspect that gun ownership correlates strongly with holding traditional values.

    Our children are I doctrinated that unless they conform to insane standards of thought and behavior, that they are terrible people who SHOULD die. They must believe that they must sacrifice their freedom and future to save “God’s creation” yet must accept the murder of infants. They are told it’s OK that young girls compete with transgender men in sporting events, that gender is fluid and undefinable, that fighting back against a rapist is selfish, and that they should be violently attacked or killed for believing (let alone expressing) disent from ever-changing progressive ideology. To a progressive, the individual is of no worth, youth are of no worth. How can teen suicide be bad in a society where ther murder of a newborn is considered noble?

  25. Mr. David Kledzik has an excellent response!!! they remind me of the guy who asked me why we couldn’t use nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes. The suggestion they made makes me want to purse my lips, blow through them and flip my forefinger up and down.

  26. Not having read the report, perhaps they should post each form of suicide and the number of victims that used that method. Of the number of people that I know who did, or tried, to kill themselves- only one half tried to use firearms,

  29. Rural states have higher suicide rates, often by far, from urban areas. Part of the reason why this is so has to do with health care. I knew two men who shot themselves because the MD’s in the local cowtown hospitals wouldn’t give them enough painkillers when their cancers reached the near-terminal stage. These two men who shot themselves (one with a shotgun to the chest, the other with a .22 revolver under the chin) should probably have been given as much opioid pain medication as they wanted, and allowed to die in peace, But nooooo… the medical industry wasn’t going to have them “get addicted.”

    The mental health system, sadly, is populated with lots of people who shouldn’t be advising other people. I’ve met more than a few people with PhD’s and MD’s in the mental health sector who weren’t a paragon of mental stability themselves. There seems to be no restriction as to who can go into mental health – and it shows.

    In rural areas, you’re often given few, if any options to deal with serious, life-altering situations. So when the time comes, men (and it isn’t only men, but the numbers of suicides in rural areas are majority male) will use a tool they know will work and work fast. That means a gun. The do-gooders don’t understand jack about this, and instead of understanding the problem, they’d prefer the people who are up against the limit of existence would rather die in even more pain and panic – as long as the do-gooders get to grab those guns.

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