Suicide and firearms: The need for safe storage
At the same time, the United States has a homicide rate several times higher than the rate in these other countries. “How can you have this paradox where our crime rate is about average, but our homicide rate is not average?” Dr. Swanson asked. “It has something to do with our unique relationship with firearms.” The way he sees it, after the Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, confirming the individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, “gun control is really ‘people control.’ It focuses on dangerous people. We can’t broadly limit legal access to guns. We have to figure out, ‘Who are the people so dangerous that it is justified to limit their Second Amendment right?’ That’s very hard to do. Why? Because gun violence is very complicated. It’s caused by many factors that interact with each other, and they are nonspecific – meaning that they apply to many more people who are not going to do the thing you’re trying to prevent than who will.
“Serious mental illness may be one factor – particularly in terms of gun suicide – but it contributes very little (only about 4%) to overall interpersonal violence. People with serious mental illnesses are far more likely to be victims of violence than they are to be perpetrators.”
Factors linked to a propensity for violence include being young and male, poverty, exposure to violence, being abused as a child, and substance abuse. “,” he said.
Recently, Dr. Swanson led a team of researchers that set out to analyze descriptive information on 762 individuals subjected to gun removal in Connecticut between 1999 and 2013, as part of that state’s “risk warrant” gun law (Law Contemp Probl. 2017;[80]179-208). Enacted in 1999, the statute allows police, after independently investigating and determining probable cause, to obtain a court warrant and remove guns from anyone who is found to pose an imminent risk of harming someone else or himself or herself.