The relationship between firearms and suicide: A review of the literature

Suicide rates are affected by many factors-psychiatric, biological, familial and situational. This paper focuses on one potential risk factor for completed suicide in the United States-the availability of firearms. Whether the availability of firearms might increase the rate of attempted suicide is not examined. This article is not an exhaustive review of every existing firearm-related suicide study. Rather, it provides a detailed review of the most commonly cited, representative, and thorough empirical studies in the published peer-reviewed literature relating firearms and suicide, focusing largely on the United States. The empirical studies reviewed are grouped according to whether the unit of analysis is the individual (e.g, case-control studies) or a population (e.g, ecological studies) and further divided depending on whether the analysis uses cross-sectional or time-series (longitudinal) data. We begin with a very brief overview of the suicide problem in the United States. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd.