| jason1637 said: 1. The number is random. In their mythology the only state how many people would live by failing while using other methods. They fail to mention the 41% statistic in their methodology. |
Its late, but my god man, the number is not fucking random. They break it down in detail:
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To determine those figures, we went through a number of steps and made a number of assumptions. We began with the 42,773 people who commit suicide. According to CDC, 21,334 of them use guns, and 21,439 do not. If the U.S. mirrored the other Western countries, only 3,882 would use guns. So in our model, those 3,882 remain as firearm deaths, leaving 17,452 who will not commit suicide using guns. Firearm suicide attempts succeed 90 percent of the time, so these 17,452 suicides correspond to 19,434 attempts that will not involve guns in our hypothetical. The question is what becomes of them. Some of these people, without access to a gun, would likely just choose not to attempt to suicide at all. But it’s also very likely that some will choose a different method. To be conservative in our calculation, we assumed that all of the people in this group do attempt to commit suicide using means other than firearms. The next question is how they do it. This question is particularly important because different suicide methods have wide-ranging success rates. While 90 percent of people who attempt suicide with guns succeed, that’s only true of 81 percent of people who attempt to suffocate themselves, 32 percent of people who jump from a significant height, and 4 percent of people who attempt to poison themselves. (We’re using the CDC’s nonfatal self-harm data here, which includes the number of people who attempt self-harm that leads them to end up in the emergency room.) It’s impossible to know what mix of these alternative methods people who no longer use guns would try. But we’ve come up with two estimates, which you can think of as the lower and upper bounds on the expected decline in suicide rates. Depending on which we use, we either find that the suicide rate declines 20 percent or 38 percent. 38 percent In this estimate, we apply the same mix of methods that people currently use to attempt suicide – excluding firearms. This distribution – 51 percent poisoning, 24 percent cutting, four percent suffocation, one percent jumping and 20 percent other methods — has an overall fatality rate of 6 percent. In other words, 94 percent of the people who would otherwise have killed themselves with guns now would live. Obviously, in this scenario, almost all the people who would have died with guns live. So, under this scenario, the total deaths from suicides would be 38 percent lower. Here’s how the math looks on that: Now: 21,439 original non-gun suicides This scenario: 21,439 original non-gun suicides But this impact may be too high. Gun users could be more serious about dying than some people who cut themselves or take minor overdoses. That means, they may go to more extreme measures to make sure their suicide is successful. Some academic research finds that method choice is unrelated to the intensity of someone’s intent to die. That is, gun users are no more intent on dying than poison users, so there’s no reason to think they would attempt poisoning differently and die at a higher rate. However, some studies draw the opposite conclusion. 20 percent To consider a more conservative option, we apply the same mix of methods that people currently use who succeed at suicide – again, excluding firearms. Since this is replicating the mix of methods used by people who have a higher intent on killing themselves, it might reflect the gun suicide population better. This distribution – 53 percent suffocation, 32 percent poisoning, five percent jumping, three percent cutting and seven percent other methods – has an overall fatality rate of 46 percent. In other words, just 54 percent of the people who would otherwise have killed themselves with guns now would live. Under this scenario, the total deaths from suicides would be more modest 20 percent lower. Here’s how the math looks on that: Now: 21,439 original non-gun suicides This scenario: 21,439 original non-gun suicides This latter estimate of the decline may be too low because it excludes people who are serious suicide attempters, but don’t die, skewing our distribution toward deadlier methods. Reality may be somewhere in between these assumptions — in between those 20 and 38 percent figures. |
