文章基本信息

标题：Study: Handgun restriction reduces suicides
作者：STEVE BERRY Los Angeles Times
期刊名称：The Topeka Capital-Journal
印刷版ISSN：1067-1994
出版年度：1999
卷号：Nov 19, 1999
出版社：Morris Multimedia, Inc.

Study: Handgun restriction reduces suicides

STEVE BERRY Los Angeles Times

By STEVE BERRY

Los Angeles Times

ACalifornia study in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine suggests that restricting people's ability to buy handguns can reduce the suicide rate.

The study, conducted by the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, has found that gun buyers, especially women, are more likely to kill themselves than are people in the general population, especially during the first week after the purchase.

The study, which tracked more than 238,292 people from 1991 when they bought their firearms through 1996, said the firearm suicide rate for the buyers was 57 times higher during the first week after their purchases than for the population as a whole.

The rate among gun buyers plummeted after the first year, but it is still double the rate among the general population through the remaining five years of the study.

Although there have been numerous studies showing that gun ownership increases the likelihood of suicides and other firearm deaths in the home, this is the first to track an entire population of gun buyers to compare their suicide rates with the rates in the general population.

It could help to refocus the gun control debate on whether firearm regulation is needed more for public health purposes than for crime control purposes.

"The public's attention had been focused predominantly on gun homicides, but in reality, there have been substantially more gun suicides in most years, " said Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine physician and lead author of the study.

Paul Blackman, a spokesman for the NRA's lobbying arm, dismissed the study's significance.

"It's not clear that any conclusions can be drawn beyond the fact the 15-day waiting period (for buying a gun) didn't stop suicides, and that it undermines the anti-gun argument that suicide is a spur of the moment thing that requires a waiting period," Blackman said.