Plan B Forum

TEN years of suicide data after John Howard's decision to ban and then buy back 600,000 semi-automatic rifles and shotguns has had a stunning effect.



The buyback cut firearm suicides by 74 per cent, saving 200 lives a year, according to research to be published in The American Law and Economics Review.

A former Australian Treasury economist, Christine Neill, now with Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, said she found the research result so surprising she tried to redo her calculations on the off chance the total could have been smaller.

''I fully expected to find no effect at all,'' she told the Herald. ''That we found such a big effect and that it meshed with a range of other data was just shocking, completely unexpected.''

Mr Howard's agreement with the states to ban and buy back more than 600,000 weapons after the massacre at Port Arthur in April 1996 cut the country's stock of firearms by 20 per cent and roughly halved the number of households with access to guns.

Two of the independent rural MPs now holding the balance of power in Parliament opposed the plan. At the time the Queensland MP Bob Katter said Australia had got ''to the ludicrous point of completely disarming the nation'' and said ''everywhere they ban guns the death rates from guns go up''.

Tony Windsor, then in the NSW Parliament, tried to introduce an amendment that would have registered gun owners rather than firearms.

Dr Neill says that while it seems surprising that a 20 per cent cut in the number of firearms would have cut the number of suicides from firearms by 74 per cent, none of her academic colleagues have found fault with her finding.

Her co-author is the Australian National University academic Dr Andrew Leigh, elected nine days ago as Labor MP for the ACT.

They used what is known as a difference-in-differences approach, exploiting the fact that some states withdrew guns more quickly than others and examining whether their firearm suicide rates fell faster.

A previous study had found no nationwide effect, noting that firearm suicides began falling before the buyback. However, Dr Neill and Dr Leigh found that states such as Tasmania that withdrew guns quickly had a much bigger decline in firearm suicides than states such as NSW that withdrew more slowly. Whereas the earlier study had found an increase in suicides by other methods, suggesting substitution, Dr Neill's study found no evidence of substitution within any state.

''It is simply not the case that there was an increase in non-firearm suicide deaths in states that brought back more firearms,'' she said.

''I am confident these lives were saved.''

Most of Australia's 2100 suicides each year do not involve firearms, making the 200 lives saved as a result of the firearm ban small in relation to the suicide total. But Dr Neill said applying an accepted financial value to each of these human lives resulted in an economic boost of $500 million a year - an outcome, she said, that represented $800,000 for each weapon destroyed.

''This is clearly one of John Howard's greatest legacies - perhaps even one of his greatest economic legacies,'' Dr Neill said.

''It also succeeded in its stated goal. Before the buyback, Australia used to have a multiple shooting every year or two.

''In the 13 years since, there have been none. I have calculated the probability of that happening by chance. It's extraordinarily low.''

http://www.smh.com.au/national/howards- ... 13xne.html

''It is simply not the case that there was an increase in non-firearm suicide deaths in states that brought back more firearms,'' she said.

In 2006, the lack of a measurable effect from the 1996 firearms legislation was reported in the British Journal of Criminology by Dr Jeanine Baker (a former state President of the SSAA(SA)) and Dr Samara McPhedran (Women in Shooting and Hunting).[39] De Leo, Dwyer, Firman & Neulinger,[40] studied suicide methods in men from 1979 to 1998 and found a rise in hanging suicides that started slightly before the fall in gun suicides. As hanging suicides rose at about the same rate as gun suicides fell, it is possible that there was some substitution of suicide methods.

...

In early 2009 this was followed by a paper from research at the Australian Institute of Suicide Prevention at Griffith University which concluded:

"The implemented restrictions may not be responsible for the observed reductions in firearms suicide. Data suggest that a change in social and cultural attitudes could have contributed to the shift in method preference.[48]

S.F.'s lone gun store draws neighbors' fire
Phil Bronstein

San Francisco Chronicle August 30, 2010 04:00 AM Copyright San Francisco Chronicle. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Monday, August 30, 2010

I just got back from Bosnia, and the only guns I saw were rusted relics in makeshift museums.

Somehow the capital, Sarajevo, managed to emerge from four years of hyperviolent siege with lots of bullet-pocked buildings and mortar casings as objects d'art in street stalls but with no apparent firearms problems.

Back here in San Francisco, though, where plastic bags, soda drinks and mishandled recycling cause health-hazard panic, the reopening of a totally legit gun store was bound to catch some neighborhood flak.

These aren't gangbanger street guns but licensed firearms, complete with background checks and more official limitations than we put on torture.

Still, the Northwest Bernal Alliance and three other local groups are urging authorities to deny a permit to High Bridge Arms gun store on Mission Street after a brief closure because its members don't want such a place "near our homes and/or schools."

Officially, the organizations are not opposed to people owning guns, Alliance member Jaime Ross told me. They'd just "rather have something the neighborhood could enjoy - a laundry or wine and cheese shop."

Do we really need to make a high-caliber stink about reopening the only legal firearms sales outlet in the city, even in a nice neighborhood? No. The place has been a gun store for 50 years, and local Ingleside police Capt. Louis Cassanego says that as far as he knows, "there's never been a problem." The captain is for the permit "so long as certain precautions are taken," including all legal requirements and then some. But e-mails he's seeing are running 10-1 against the store's permit application.

It's not a puppy store, after all, or community center. Neither is it a bordello.

High Bridge manager Steve Alcairo was working on the shop last week. He said he hasn't talked with anyone from the alliance and was hoping to reach out to them. Steve is a soft-spoken San Francisco native and Woodrow Wilson High grad. He believes in legalizing pot and gay rights. His Vietnam vet dad kept no guns in their Visitacion Valley home. Steve saw a kid's eye put out with a BB gun when he was 12 and knows people who have been shot.

But he feels he runs a stand-up business where customers get both examined and practical help on gun safety issues.

"I want to know where their fear comes from," he says of the store's opponents. "This is the most scrutinized and regulated business on the whole street. We're watched more closely than the health department watches restaurants."

Not to mention that the store has a steady client traffic of cops.

One group rooting for High Bridge is the Pink Pistols, a gay gun rights organization. Local chapter head Tom (he wouldn't give his last name) put a uniquely green spin on this. "California now has a law that you can't receive ammunition through the mail. And many people in San Francisco don't have cars." Therefore, a city gun store is helpful and encourages the use of mass transit.

OK, maybe that's a stretch. But Tom notes that High Bridge is "a lawful business conducted in a lawful way for people who want to lawfully participate in the shooting sports." Lawful. I get it.

Now can everyone just be sensible?



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... z0y6eMEsaG

dales wrote:People kill people.

Scooter wrote:
And none of that has anything to do with your assertion that Australian suicides increased because of the depth of the recession in the U.K.

Suicides Increase During Spring And Recession
By eNotAlone.com
Published: April 28, 2009

There is a number of factors which can contribute to the risk of suicide, such as psychiatric disorder, drug or alcohol abuse, previous self-harm, upbringing, smoking and so on. Among employed individuals, doctors (in particular, female), veterinary surgeons, pharmacists, nurses, dentists and farmers are all at most risk of committing suicide as they have easy access to drugs or poisons which can be used for killing oneself. These are the findings that have been reported in the latest issue of the medical journal the Lancet.

More and more people commit suicide during a current time of global recession. Suicidal attempts also increase during springtime, making this spring a dangerous combination. Each year, nearly 1 million people commit suicide, which accounts for 1.5 per cent of all deaths throughout the world, according to researchers Keith Hawton of Oxford University and Kees van Heeringen of University Hospital in Gent, Belgium. The scientists also found that there is a great difference in suicide rates between countries and regions of the world and even across different latitudes.

Within Europe, rates are generally higher in northern countries compared to southern countries. Finland, Latvia, Hungary, China, Japan and Kazakhstan all have exceptionally high rates of suicide, 20 per 100,000 people or higher. In Lithuania the rate is almost 40 per 100.000 people. Suicide is a major concern in former Soviet republics, the study says. More than 30 per cent of all suicides worldwide occur in China, where 3.6 per cent of all deaths happen by suicide. This number is far above its proportion of the global population. In developed countries, the male-to-female ratio for suicide is between 2 to 1 and 4 to 1, and the numbers seem to be climbing up. Asian countries typically show much lower male-to-female ratios, but these might also be increasing. However, in China more female than male appear to die by killing themselves.

Just below the world average of 15 suicides per 100,000 people are the United States, Canada and Australia, while rates dropped below 5 per 100,000 in Greece, Mexico, Brazil, Iran and Egypt. In the United States, white individuals have higher suicide rates compared to Hispanics or African Americans, though this gap is narrowing due to a surge in death rates among young black men, the investigators say. In most countries, senior citizens have the highest suicide rates, however, in the past 50 years rates have risen in young people as well, and particularly in men during springtime.

Differences between the two genders show up in methods of suicide chosen. In general, men prefer to choose more violent means for suicide, such as fire arms and hanging, while women opt for less violent means, such as poisoning themselves. Different populations use differing suicide methods. For example, women in South Asia commonly set fire to themselves to commit suicide.

According to one theory, the reasons behind suicide are biological, with the change of season after a period of extended dark days without sun, provoking some as yet unknown neuro-chemical imbalance. Another theory is social: witnessing other individuals who seem to be more happy with their life may be especially hard to take at that time of year. Suicide, not surprisingly, is quite common among people without a job, though there may also be a secondary association with mental illness or psychiatric disorder, which can often be a barrier to finding and maintaining a job.

The authors said that future studies and research on this matter must concentrate on the "development and assessment of empirically based suicide-prevention and treatment protocols. The challenges of preventing suicide in developing countries need particular attention, because most research comes from developed countries, but most deaths by suicides happen in developing countries."

loCAtek wrote:

Scooter wrote:And none of that has anything to do with your assertion that Australian suicides increased because of the depth of the recession in the U.K.

I clarified that by saying it was a Global Recession

Revealed: Australia's suicide epidemic
Ruth Pollard Investigations Editor
August 21, 2009

AUSTRALIA has dangerously miscalculated its suicide statistics - by as much as 30 per cent in NSW and Queensland - leaving a silent and growing epidemic of mounting deaths.

The figures are in stark contrast to years of backslapping by state and federal governments, congratulating themselves for reducing suicide rates from a peak of 2700 in 1997.

The Herald can reveal the suicide toll is as high now as it was in the 1990s - if not higher - with experts predicting a further rise as the impact of rising unemployment and other economic factors bite.


Ten people each month take their lives either inside a state health facility or within a week of having contact with one.

Discharged too soon from emergency departments, left unobserved in psychiatric wards or denied admission to overcrowded inpatient facilities, their deaths reveal a pattern of repeated systemic failures that demands urgent reform.

The dangerous combination of government under-investment, shutting families out of hospital and police processes, a lack of training and a general community malaise about how to prevent suicide means so many are falling through the cracks.

In the 18 months to June 2008, at least 175 people died from suicide within seven days of contact with the health system, figures from the NSW Clinical Excellence Commission show.

A coroner's inquest into a man who shot himself within hours of being discharged from hospital concluded last week, with police and health departments questioned over their protocols for dealing with people at risk.

In another death, in which a woman set fire to herself after being denied help by a public hospital, the coroner noted: ''This death was preventable and is probably the most tragic example of NSW Health's inability and/or failure to deal with individual cases in an appropriate manner.''

John Mendoza, an adjunct associate professor at the University of Sydney faculty of medicine, said the real rate of suicide was about 2500-2700. ''With this economic downturn we can expect that to increase by around 10 per cent, so we are looking at approximately 3000 people each year,'' he said. ''None of this takes into account suicides by way of single vehicle accidents - these are the only aspect of road accident deaths rising as a percentage of total deaths.''

These figures indicate a major health problem and are much higher than the Bureau of Statistics count of 1800 suicide deaths a year, said Professor Mendoza, who is chairman of the Federal Government's National Advisory Council on Mental Health.

''It is a hidden epidemic and yet the Federal Government only invests $1 per person per year on suicide prevention.''

The director of health and vital statistics at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Tara Pritchard, confirmed the bureau would release updated figures in March to correct the undercounting.

''What that revision of ABS data will show us is that really we have gone nowhere in terms of overall reductions from the peaks in suicide rates in the early 1990s, and we have certainly gone nowhere among reducing suicide in indigenous populations. They remain four times higher overall,'' Professor Mendoza said.

Governments had done little more than the bare minimum to prevent deaths, said Dawn O'Neil, chief executive officer of Lifeline.

''Once we got confirmation the rates were not coming down … the Government didn't want to know, politically they wanted to believe that the suicide rates were falling.''

The Herald can reveal the suicide toll is as high now as it was in the 1990s - if not higher - with experts predicting a further rise as the impact of rising unemployment and other economic factors bite.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Just tell me what are the glaring areas of mental health neglect in your experience that are demanding a higher priority than this government is giving?

JOHN MENDOZA: Well, let's take the two first of all that the Government has actually recognised in its response in the federal Budget, the most recent federal Budget. It announced with a great deal of fanfare the investment in expanding the Headspace youth mental health initiative. That was an initiative in fact begun by the Howard Government in 2004.

...

KERRY O'BRIEN: Well, Nicola Roxon said today with regard to your claims that spending on mental health programs will nearly double over the current four years. That doesn't impress you?

JOHN MENDOZA: This is a convenient sample, you might say, Kerry. What they've done is some funny numbers here. They've taken four years of funding; the first two years - sorry, the two years prior to the 2006 COAG commitment on mental health and the very first two years of that commitment which were the lower spending as the program started to ramp up. They've taken that convenient four years and they've compared it to the last three years of the Howard Government COAG plan and one further year and said, "Well there's the evidence. We've doubled the expenditure." But that expenditure was always seen by John Howard, Morris Iemma and the other premiers and chief ministers at the time as the first step towards reform, as the first payment. And the Senate report in 2006 made it abundantly clear that we needed to continue to scale up this investment if we had any chance of actually stemming the flow of people to acute care units, the revolving door problem that's so well-described, the problems we have with about two-thirds of our prison population's being people with mental health problems, two thirds of our street people, our homeless people with mental health problems. If we're gonna tackle those problems, we're not gonna solve it in one term of Parliament, but we do need a clear commitment, a strategic approach, to resolving the crisis and we have not seen anything in the announcements of the Rudd Government to date that are going to address those needs.


Kerry O'Brien speaks with John Mendoza following his resignation as chair of the Federal Government's National Advisory Council on Mental Health.