THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FIREARMS AND SUICIDE - A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Suicide rates are affected by many factors-psychiatric, biological, fa milial and situational. This paper focuses on one potential risk facto r for completed suicide in the United States-the availability of firea rms. Whether the availability of firearms might increase the rate of a ttempted suicide is not examined. This article is not an exhaustive re view of every existing firearm-related suicide study. Rather, it provi des a detailed review of the most commonly cited, representative, and thorough empirical studies in the published peer-reviewed literature r elating firearms and suicide, focusing largely on the United States. T he empirical studies reviewed are grouped according to whether the uni t of analysis is the individual (e.g, case-control studies) or a popul ation (e.g, ecological studies) and further divided depending on wheth er the analysis uses cross-sectional or time-series (longitudinal) dat a. We begin with a very brief overview of the suicide problem in the U nited States. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd.