HILADELPHIA, March 20 (AP) — The rate of suicides involving guns among black male teenagers nearly quadrupled from 1979 to 1994 before falling in the late 1990's, a study has found.Posted on 03/22/2002 11:26:45 PM PST by xm177e2
HILADELPHIA, March 20 (AP) — The rate of suicides involving guns among black male teenagers nearly quadrupled from 1979 to 1994 before falling in the late 1990's, a study has found.
The rate among white male teenagers climbed by more than a third from the late 1970's until the early 1990's before also falling.
Traditionally, blacks have had much lower suicide rates than whites, but the availability of guns may help account for the narrowing of the gap among young men, researchers said.
"One of the factors is the easy availability of firearms," said David Satcher, the former surgeon general and now a visiting fellow with the Kaiser Family Foundation. He was not involved with the study.
The study, which uses data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that suicide by gun among 15- to 19-year-old black males rose to a peak of 13.9 per 100,000 in 1994 from 3.6 per 100,000 in 1979. The rate for 1997, the most recent year studied, was 8.4 per 100,000.
For white males in the same age group, the gun-related suicide rate was 9.7 per 100,000 in 1979. It peaked at 13.6 per 100,000 in 1991 before dropping to 10.4 per 100,000 in 1997.
The study appears this month in Psychiatric Services, a journal published by the American Psychiatric Association.
The study did not look at causes for the suicide rates. But its co-author, Sean Joe, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Pennsylvania, speculated that young blacks feel more pressure to succeed than older generations of blacks, who could point to segregation and other obstacles to achievement.
TANDEM BIAS: The NY Times joins hands with the authors of a study on teenage suicide to produce an anti-gun article (full text in italics):
Data on Teenage Black Men Show Rise in Suicide by Gun
The focus is on blacks even though the study found a rise in both black and white rates; the rate among blacks did increase more, but that isn't compelling (see below).
PHILADELPHIA, March 20 (AP) — The rate of suicides involving guns among black male teenagers nearly quadrupled from 1979 to 1994 before falling in the late 1990's, a study has found.
The rate among white male teenagers climbed by more than a third from the late 1970's until the early 1990's before also falling.
Notice that it is RATES here, not actual numbers. If you have, say, 1% of 100 black teens committing suicide and 10% of white teens, and they go up by the numbers mentioned, quadrupling the rate would mean 4% or 4 black teens while white suicide going up by a third would be 13% or 13 white teens – the same increase in actual numbers.
Traditionally, blacks have had much lower suicide rates than whites, but the availability of guns may help account for the narrowing of the gap among young men, researchers said.
Note below that the study doesn’t look at causes, yet here we have the article's author setting up a quote about causation that has no support anywhere.
"One of the factors is the easy availability of firearms," said David Satcher, the former surgeon general and now a visiting fellow with the Kaiser Family Foundation. He was not involved with the study.
Satcher makes a blanket, unsupported statement. He was not involved in the study. So how does he know? He gives no evidence, such as saying “as was found in such and such a study in 1999” or whenever. His credentials are given as proof of his veracity, rather than any actual study. That’s bad science AND bad journalism.
It isn't reported whether the study looked at other causes of suicide - did suicides by hanging or overdosing go up by comparable rates? Are suicides using guns more frequent than other types? Those factors are important in determining whether availability of firearms could be a factor, which is still far from a blanket statement like Satcher makes.
The study, which uses data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that suicide by gun among 15- to 19-year-old black males rose to a peak of 13.9 per 100,000 in 1994 from 3.6 per 100,000 in 1979. The rate for 1997, the most recent year studied, was 8.4 per 100,000.
For white males in the same age group, the gun-related suicide rate was 9.7 per 100,000 in 1979. It peaked at 13.6 per 100,000 in 1991 before dropping to 10.4 per 100,000 in 1997.
Notice that the peak of each category was in the early 1990s, which we don’t learn higher up, and that while black teen suicide peaked at a higher rate than white, it is now lower than the white rate again. And remember that comparable rates can produce vastly different actual numbers; it's likely that more white kids than black kids were dying in suicides throughout the period in question.
The study appears this month in Psychiatric Services, a journal published by the American Psychiatric Association.
The study did not look at causes for the suicide rates. But its co-author, Sean Joe, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Pennsylvania, speculated that young blacks feel more pressure to succeed than older generations of blacks, who could point to segregation and other obstacles to achievement.
Read that again. "The study did not look at causes for the suicide rates. But..." What do we have in this article but repeated statements of causation? Again, bad science and bad journalism. You can speculate about what the causes are, but the speculation should be based on other studies when yours doesn’t look at causation. At the very least, suspected causes should be identified as suspected with assurances that further studies will be done to prove or disprove the connection.
The point of this article is to make it very clear that the cause of increased teen suicide, especially among blacks, is the availability of guns. But they admit that there is NO SUPPORT for this conclusion in their study – they didn’t even look at it! So they had to go outside to find anecdotal conclusions – not scientific ones. Notice that the person who linked it to guns was a researcher who was not even connected to the study. There is no evidence that he has more than a passing knowledge of research on gun deaths or causation of suicide - just that he was a surgeon general. For the Clinton Administration. No bias at all there, I am sure.
The last paragraph, where researcher Sean Joe did go outside the sphere of his study to make conclusions about causation, skids off into ideological blaming that on its way to his purpose actually creates an impression I don’t think he meant. He says that young blacks feel a pressure to succeed that older blacks didn’t feel – a pressure that by implication is bad because it resulted in a higher rate of suicide. Then he explains why the older generation did not feel the pressure – they could point to obstacles to achievement! This a) says the older generation couldn’t achieve because of the obstacles and b) the obstacles are now gone, because the pressure to achieve is present. Isn’t the absence of obstacles a good thing? Doesn't that mean the door to opportunity has opened wider? And if we want to speculate, given the data it seems that whatever additional pressures were in play in the early 90s have eased - couldn't that just as easily mean that the black teenagers have adjusted to the greater expectations that more opportunities bring, and are now handling it well? The study doesn't support that directly, but my speculation is at least if not more grounded in the study than that of the other researchers.
My major objections to this characterization are two-fold – it is bad science to attribute causation when none has been found in your study, especially when that attribution is done for the purposes of ideological pandering; and also, when you attribute causation without studying the facts you could be directing efforts at prevention toward a non-existent or spurious factor when other factors are much more potent. You could actually cause increases in the problem by approaching it through your bias rather than through rigorous study.
An article like this is not just meaningless bias to point at and laugh. It can cause actual harm.
(Thanks to reader Ron Binns for fact-checking and correcting me on the years Satcher was surgeon general.)
I can think of something white men have traditionally had and black men are exposed to in increasing numbers. It could be the causal factor. I'm not talking about money or success or middle-class values.
The cause of the traditionally highest white male suicide rate and the increasing black male suicide rate: white women -- as Malcom X put it: "The white man's prize." I know that most white men, my mostly-white self included, will tell you that's where most of their grief in life came from.
Just a thought. The timelines of the trends fit eachother. I would like to see a retrospective study of the comparative suicide rates between black men in same-race relationships and black men in mixed-race relationships.
I am not really a mysogynist.
Wow, a two-fer. BTW, didn't gun sales explode from 1993 on, when Clinton got in office and started his anti-gun crusade. Suicides declined just at the time gun sales went up.
They know I am right, and won't bother denying it.
Either that or they are scared of me. I called someone a b*tch once on a thread about how bad men are. They have been trembling ever since.
Actually, the real reason for the silence is: to refute me, they will seem to be advocating interracial relationships, which sounds very liberal, so nobody dares to take the bait.
They want to, but they can't... tee hee....
White women are evil!
If you don't deny the charge, it is an admission of guilt.
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