Firearm Access and Suicide
- Paul H. Blackman, PhD
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
Excerpt
To the Editor. —I would like to make some comments regarding the small-scale study of adolescent suicide in western Pennsylvania,1 even though the basic recommendation—that access to firearms by suicidal teenagers should be restricted by parents—is not controversial.
First, projecting from the authors' data, overall gun ownership levels in the households of suicidal (including attempts and completions) and nonsuicidal teenagers in a psychiatric hospital were at most 45%, but hunting license information and other data suggest that household gun ownership levels are significantly higher in the nontroubled teenaged population of western Pennsylvania. Although the study is too small-scale to be conclusive, the suggestion that household gun ownership is positively associated with mentally healthy teenagers is certainly worthy of more study.
Second, while the small-scale study—a sampling of 67 suicides over a 1½-year period in the western section of a large and populous state—attempted to find all teen suicides, suicides
Footnotes
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Edited by Drummond Rennie, MD, Deputy Editor (West), and Bruce B. Dan, MD, Senior Editor.
