Data in Policy Debate: Fitting Data to Your Gun Control Story

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• Homicides vs gun deaths - I'm assuming gun deaths includes suicides. So really the conclusion we can come to here is 'there is a positive correlation between gun ownership and fatal self inflicted or accidental gunshot wounds'

  Yes, people trying to kill themselves will often go for the easiest option - a firearm if available. Including them in the chart is extremely misleading.

• Suicides are the majority of gun deaths (overwhelmingly male). Given that men are so much more successful (?) at suicide than women, it is likely those deaths would have occurred some other way if guns were harder to get

• Is this actually true? I would be interested in seeing a chart of total suicide rate vs. gun ownership rate.

  This might be useful: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-ownership-and-use/

  It seems to suggest that availability of firearms does actually increase the suicide rate.

• http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/05/24/suicides-account-for-most-gun-deaths/
  60% of gun deaths are suicides. (35% homicides, 5% police/accidental/other)
  just over 50% of successful suicide attempts use a gun.
  80% of successful suicide attempts are male.
  http://www.afsp.org/understanding-suicide/facts-and-figures
  75% of suicide attempts, however, are female :
  http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html
  U.S. Suicide Statistics (2001)

  Attempted Suicides

  There are approximately 750,000 suicide attempts each year.

  An estimated 5 million living Americans have attempted suicide.

  More females attempt suicide than males.
  (3 female attempts for each male attempt.)

  Males who attempt are much more "successful" and are much more likely to use a gun. Whether they use a gun and are therefore more likely to complete the attempt, or they are more determined to die, and thus pick the simplest method to guarantee results is undetermined.

• Bingo, you got the big one. It's also worth noting that the second graph includes homicides not caused by guns. So my takeaway here is the same as yours: in states with more guns, guns are used more often in homicide or suicide, but that it doesn't seem to increase the likelihood that homicide and suicide would happen.

• The second graph also shows homicide rate vs percentage of the population owning a firearm. It's possible that the same percentage of the population that is most likely to commit homicides is also the most likely to be armed. Or, phrased another way, decreasing absolute percentages of gun ownership in the population as a whole is irrelevant if you're not able to reduce gun ownership among the sub-sections of the population most likely to commit crimes.

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