Women 50% more likely to die by suicide if they live with handgun owner, study finds
Women living with handgun owners are 50% more likely to die by suicide than their female neighbors who live in gun-free households, according to a study published Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry.
Dr. Matthew Miller, the lead author on the study and a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, said it is the lethality of guns that accounts for the significant difference. Other studies have shown, he said, that women in gun-free households do not enjoy any better mental health conditions or think about suicide any less or attempt suicide any less often than women who live with handgun owners.
“The chance of dying in an attempt depends greatly on the method one reaches for in a crisis,” said Miller, a professor of epidemiology and health sciences at Northeastern University. “Guns don’t give many second chances at life; most other commonly used methods do.”
To understand the secondhand impact of gun ownership, researchers started out by looking at 9.5 million California women who were living in handgun-free households over a roughly 12-year period. During that time, handguns were legally acquired by people living with 331,968 of the women.
By the end of the study period, 2,197 women had died by suicide, researchers found, and about 15% of those deaths were by firearm.
While rates of suicide were the same between the two groups for other methods of suicide, Miller and other researchers said, the addition of guns led to a much higher rate of suicide for women who lived in households with firearms.
“Despite widespread perceptions that a gun in the home makes its inhabitants safer, rigorous studies have been nearly unanimous in finding that people who live in homes with guns are at higher risk of dying violent deaths, whether by homicide, suicide or in accidents,” said co-author David Studdert, a professor of health policy and law at Stanford University. “But homes don’t own guns; people do. And sorting out exactly who in these homes faces elevated risks and estimating the size of those risks is vitally important.”
This study assembled the largest-ever cohort to estimate the secondhand risk of suicide in households with firearms. The rate of suicide for women living with an adult handgun owner was 5.84 suicides per 100,000 annually, Miller said, compared with a yearly rate of 4.14 suicides per 100,000 among women who had no handgun owners in their homes.
A UC Davis study published in 2020 found that gun owners are four times more likely to die by suicide than individuals who do not own guns, and in that case, researchers also noted that the lethality of the firearms was a key factor.
This story was originally published April 28, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
