It might not be a valid assumption that if a gun wasn’t available, the individual would just have used another method...but I’d venture to say it will be true much of the time.
Suicidees who don’t have guns sometimes use bridges....
There have been a number of "substitution of method" studies. What they show is that there may be an initial drop in suicides when one method is made more difficult. Then, in a year or two, another method picks up the slack.
In England, one favored method was to place one's head in an oven and turn on the gas, which had quite a bit of carbon monoxide in it.
The authorities got rid of the carbon monoxide, suicides by oven gas went down. In a couple of years other methods (hanging as I recall) went up.
In Australia, with the big gun confiscation/turn-in, suicides by gun went down, but single car fatalities and suicide by hanging went up. Overall, the suicide rate never decreased in Australia. It went up.
You do not need guns for very high suicide rates. Both Japan and South Korea have some of the highest suicide rates in the world, and have very few suicides with guns.
It isn’t true in Europe, Japan, Russia and many places where Gibbs are banned. Find are not the suicide cause
Japan has nearly complete gun control along with a substantially larger suicide rate.
Humans are inventive creatures.
Though I haven’t looked into it in years, in the past, Japan had a higher suicide rate than the US, which used to completely undercut the argument.
If someone wants to kill themselves, they will find a way.
Mark
The Japanese and Australian studies bear this out.
Another issue here is that most lethal suicides are performed by men between forty and 70. The gun is a method overwhelmingly employed by men.
It might not be a valid assumption that if a gun wasn’t available, the individual would just have used another method...but I’d venture to say it will be true much of the time.
If that were so, then why does Japan, which has almost no guns in private hands, have a higher per capita suicide rate than the US. 14.3 vs 13.7.
The US is 34th in the world for suicides per capita with both Finland and Belgian (and Japan) ahead of us.
If someone wants to kill themselves, they’ll find a way. The female TV meteorologist who killed herself a few days ago, hanged herself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate