24-year-old David Katz is accused of going on a shooting rampage during a video game tournament before taking his own life.
USA TODAY
Sunday’s shooting at a video game tournament in Jacksonville, Florida, once again trained a spotlight on the problems of gun violence and mental health in the United States, while the matter of the suspect killing himself got secondary billing.
But a new study underscores just how serious an issue gun suicide has become.
The comprehensive global report, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at firearm-related fatalities from 1990-2016. University of Washington researchers found that more than 250,000 people were killed by guns in 2016, not including deaths from conflicts, terrorism or law-enforcement activities.
Six countries in the Americas – Brazil, the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Guatemala – accounted for half those deaths.
And while the U.S. ranked fourth in the world with 12,400 firearm-related homicides, that figure pales in comparison to its 23,800 gun suicides. None of the other 194 nations and territories in the report came close; India ranked second at 13,400.
Except for Greenland, which had only 11 total suicides through use of a firearm, the U.S. had the world’s highest rate of such deaths with 6.4 per 100,000 people.
“Gun suicides continue to be kind of an underreported story in the sense that when people think of gun violence, they think of homicides, they think of gangs or mass shooters or personal violence,’’ said Robert Spitzer, author of five books on gun policy. “But the firearm-suicide fatality rate is a large number and a public health problem.’’
Spitzer is among several experts who point to a strong correlation between suicide and easy access to guns.
In the case of David Katz, whom police have identified as the shooter who killed two persons and wounded another 10 before taking his own life in the Jacksonville incident, reports indicate he bought two weapons legally despite having a history of mental illness.
In June, a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said suicide rates have been climbing in almost every state, citing suicide as one of three of the 10 leading causes of death that was rising.
One of the report’s top recommendations for preventing suicides was reducing access to firearms, which were used in 53 percent of the cases in 2016. Statistics show nine out of 10 suicide attempts using a gun are lethal, whereas less than 10 percent of the attempts relying on ingesting pills or slashing wrists will succeed, according to a JAMA editorial in November 2017.
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Estimates of the number of weapons in the U.S. vary, though many put that figure at about one for each of the 327 million people in the country. A study released in June by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva calculated the number of guns in this country at 393 million, or 40 percent of the arms in the world.
“When people who have guns around the house are depressed and then they have suicidal impulses and there’s easy access to a lethal means, that’s how you get (those results),’’ said Chris Murray, one of the senior authors of the UW study.
The report said the number of firearm-related deaths worldwide rose from 209,000 in 1990 to 251,000 in 2016, while the rate of about four per 100,000 dipped slightly. In that last year of the study, 64 percent of the global deaths due to gunshot wounds were homicides, 27 percent suicides and 9 percent accidental.
Some of the findings were more striking, particularly with the U.S. – which boasts the world’s largest economy and a stable democracy – finding itself among the leaders in gun violence alongside nations enduring political and economic turmoil, like Venezuela and Brazil.
The latter topped the charts for firearm-related deaths with 43,200 in 2016, or 5,000 more than the U.S. India, with a population of 1.34 billion, came in third with 26,500. The U.S. fared better in gun fatalities per 100,000 people, tying for 19th at 10.6. El Salvador had the worst rate at 39.2.
“You look at the numbers and you might start to compare us to other countries in the region, whereas probably we should be comparing ourselves to Australia or New Zealand or other high-income countries in western Europe where both the firearm suicide and homicide numbers are much lower,’’ Murray said. “That tells me that, fundamentally, these are preventable deaths.’’
Murray said some of the measures that have been effective in curbing gun violence in other countries included more restricted access to firearms and buy-back programs.
He pointed out the parts of the U.S. with high rates of homicides related to guns are different than those with a high incidence of suicides using those weapons so the approaches need to be different. The data indicate legally acquired guns are typically used in suicides, whereas homicides often involve illegal firearms.
Steps beyond gun-control legislation will be needed to reduce the number of preventable deaths in this country, said Kimya Dennis, associate professor of sociology and criminal studies at Salem College in North Carolina.
Dennis was not surprised about the results of the study and said improving on them will require a change of mind-set, especially regarding the right to bear arms.
“You have to look at the larger structure, what’s happening culturally and why people think having access to firearms means something,’’ she said. “A lot of people who have access to firearms think it represents a constitutional right. It’s troubling to call yourself the most powerful nation in the world, and then firearm access is supposed to represent that liberty. That’s creepy.’’
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