Suicide Women
“86% of all women killed by firearms are U.S. women,” says a disturbingly biased medical journal article. Shame that the same research shows that the “problem” isn’t guns but mental health.
“Homicide, Suicide, and Unintentional Firearm Fatality: Comparing the United States With Other High-Income Countries, 2003” is a somewhat outdated piece of gun control industry funded effluvium (the give-away was in the footnotes, one of which reads “David Hemenway received partial support from the Joyce Foundation”). Any study that begins with a conclusion – in this case the assumption that guns are a problem, and a unique problem in the United States – is instantly invalid. Had the authors studied what causes people to die, then slowly dug to discover which mode of demise were statistically important, the research would be allowed. This academic sanitary paper will not.
What the gun control industry bought and published are a number of scary sounding stats, such as “86% of all women killed by firearms are U.S. women.” The goal was to find ways of frightening women. But we know from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime that women are less likely than men to be murdered in the United States than other industrialized countries. Since this is the case, how then can nearly 90% of shot women be only in the U.S. of A.?
The issue is mainly suicide.
Buried in the same article, yet never formed into a headline or aped by the gun control industry, is the simple fact that more women shoot themselves than get shot by someone else. Almost twice as many. In the same article one table revealed that in 2003 17% more women plugged themselves than were assassinated by other people. That the numbers presented in the paper do not agree with the Center for Disease Control’s mortality database by virtue of the authors averaging all ages (including the low, low, low accidental gun deaths for youngsters) increases the dubious nature of this industrial grade canard.
That women murdered with guns occur 1/5th as often as for men adds to the obfuscation that the Joyce Foundation invested in.
But that got our investigative juices flowing. The key questions include:
- Is this consistent? Do women more often commit firearm suicides than are firearm homicide victims?
- Is the rate changing as more guns enter public ownership?
The suicide situation has gotten worse and the homicide rates have gotten better.
Over the latest 15 years (2013 being the most recent year in which data was available) the firearm homicide rate has fallen 14%, as has most violent crime. However, the total female suicide rate has been rising. Of all suicidal women, twice as many chose other means to kill themselves as they do with guns.
Wrap your head around these separate data points. Women are nearly half less likely to get be murdered with a gun than to murder themselves with one. And they are half as likely to use a gun to kill themselves that some other method, such as poison, hanging and overdosing on Häagen-Dazs.
Would you have understood that when you read “86% of all women killed by firearms are U.S. women”?
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