Guns & Suicide Rates – Japan has no guns but high suicide rate

Japan has almost no gun ownership and absolutley no private handgun ownership. Despite this Japan has a much higher suicide rate than we do in the US!

Male suicide rates via nationmaster:

#21 Japan: 25 per 100,000 people
#30 United States: 19.8 per 100,000 people

Female suicide rates via nationmaster:

#8 Japan: 12 per 100,000 people
#40 United States: 4.4 per 100,000 people

These stats are from 1994. I don’t have the current set of statistics. Unfortunately for Japan, things have become much worse:

The total number of Japanese suicides is roughly equal to that of the entire United States, a country that has more than twice Japan’s population. To put the latest data in context, in today’s Japan one is roughly five times as likely to die by one’s own hand as to be killed in a traffic accident.

And apparently these suicides aren’t gun related either:

Since 2003, the Aokigahara woods at the base of Mount Fuji have been known as the “suicide forest” because 78 middle-aged men apparently committed suicide by hanging themselves from tree branches.

And according to David Kopel in 1990:

Guns are used in about one-fifth of all Swiss suicides compared to three-fifths of American and one-third of Canadian suicides.

Keep in mind that there is a gun in just about every house in Switzerland. And up to 14% of Swiss households have a fully automatic machine gun. Despite what anti-gun lobbyists will have you believe, ammo is cheap and easy to access and it is only the emergency ammo that is inspected in Switzerland. So it’s a pretty far stretch to claim guns cause suicides. See the image below of a Swiss man carrying an assault rifle in the supermarket:

A breakdown of suicide statistics:
The Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) WISQARS reports that in 2004 there were 32,439 suicides in the US, 16,750 with firearm – roughly half (51.6%). In 1999, it was 29,199 total vs 16,599 with firearm, a bit more than half (56.8%). So things have changed since David Kopel’s 1990 statistics. Despite the fact that there are 70 million more guns in America in 2004 than there was in 1991, gun use for suicides actually dropped from 1990 to 1999 and dropped again from 1999 to 2004.

According Statistics Canada there were 3,764 Canadian suicides in 2003. 618^X71-X73 or 16.4% of Canada’s 2003 suicides were performed via firearms. Despite the fact that the people of Canada have easy access to firearms, the number one choice for suicide was hanging.

Source:
Asia Times, Suicide also rises in land of rising sun By J Sean Curtin Jul 28, 2004
Statistics Canada, CANSIM Table, Deaths, by cause, Chapter XX: External causes of morbidity and mortality (V01 to Y89), age group and sex, Canada, annual (number)
THR

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