Elsevier

Applied Geography

Volume 124, November 2020, 102297
Applied Geography

Investigating the association between household firearm ownership and suicide rates in the United States using spatial regression models

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2020.102297Get rights and content

Highlights

  • State-level firearm ownership was significantly associated with county-level firearm suicide rates.

  • State-level firearm ownership was not significantly associated with county-level all or non-firearm suicide rates.

  • Access to household firearms was a significant risk factor of firearm suicide in the United States.

  • Means reduction should be included in the suicide prevention strategy in the United States.

Abstract

Past studies have rather consistently shown a significant positive association between firearm ownership and suicide rates (particularly firearm-related) in the United States. However, the impact of spatial dependence of suicide rates has not been considered in the existing research that took an ecological studies approach. To bridge this gap in the literature, we estimated and compared the association using Ordinary Least Square (OLS), spatial autoregressive (SAR), and hierarchical spatial autoregressive (HSAR) regression models. The outcome variable was the average age-adjusted and smoothed suicide rate (all, firearm, and non-firearm) at the county level in the United States between 2008 and 2014. The covariates included the state-level firearm ownership and several key demographic, geographic, religious, psychopathological, and suicide-related variables at both the state and county levels. Our main findings were: 1) the spatially-informed models (SAR and HSAR) were significantly outperformed the OLS model. The SARlag model was a better choice than the SARerr model in fitting our data. However, the HSAR model was not statistically better than the SAR model; 2) based on the results from the three final SARlag models, firearm ownership was significantly associated with firearm suicide rates, but not with all or non-firearm suicide rates, and such relationships were also observed in the SARlag models using contiguity-based spatial weight matrix; and 3) The final SARlag models explained 82.6%, 84.9%, and 76.1% of the total variance in all, firearm, and non-firearm suicide rates, respectively. In conclusion, the SARlag model provided more robust evidence supporting the positive relationship between firearm suicide rate and firearm ownership. Results from this study confirmed that access to household firearms was a significant risk factor of firearm suicide in the United States and hence means reduction should be included in the suicide prevention strategy in the United States. In the future, the effect of state firearm laws and regulations on suicide rate should also be investigated using spatially informed models to gain insights on the connection among firearm ownership, firearm laws and regulations, and population-based suicide rates.

Introduction

Suicide is a complex mental health issue with devastating consequences on individuals, families, and communities worldwide. Nearly 45,000 suicide deaths were reported in the U.S. in 2016 alone, which exceeded total deaths from road accidents, or was more than 2.5 times the casualties from homicides (Our World in Data, 2019). Furthermore, among population aged 18 years and older, 9.8 million had serious suicidal thoughts, and 1.4 million had attempted suicide in the same year. Besides all the other loss, suicide also brings tremendous economic burdens. The average economic loss of one suicide death was estimated to be over $1.3 million, and the estimated annual total economic loss due to suicides and suicide attempts was between $50.8 billion and $93.5 billion in 2013 (Florence et al., 2015; Shepard et al., 2016).

The overall age-adjusted suicide rate (SR) in the United States has increased by 25.4%, from 10.5 to 13.4 per 100,000 between 1999 and 2016 (Stone et al., 2018). In addition, SRs have increased in all the 50 states except Nevada. The net increases ranged from 0.8 per 100,000 (Delaware) to 8.1 (Wyoming), while the relative increase was between 5.9% (Delaware) and 57.6% (North Dakota). Also, the SR rate increased by more than 30% in half of the states. Nevada was the only state that experienced a declined rate (1%) but the SR in the state also has been consistently higher than the national average throughout the study period (Stone et al., 2018). Moreover, SR in the western and northwestern states has been consistently higher than that in the rest of the country (Ha & Tu, 2018; Kim et al., 2011; Rossen et al., 2018; Trgovac, Kedron, and Bagchi-Sen 2015). Further, SR was not only overall higher but also has been rising faster in rural areas (Rossen et al., 2018; Singh & Siahpush, 2002).

In the United States, firearms are the most common and lethal means of suicide. In 2016, less than 5% of self-inflicted firearm shot in suicide attempts resulted in close to 50% of all suicide deaths (USDHHS 2019). The disproportionally high fatality rate of firearm suicide and the fact that the U.S. has the highest household firearm ownership in the world have led to an extensive investigation on the association between firearm ownership and SRs in the country. The case-control studies and the ecological studies are the two most common approaches used in past studies to examine such relationships (Miller & Hemenway, 1999). The former approach overall produces stronger evidence, but it usually analyzes only a small sample size and is also more difficult and costly to perform (Brent et al., 1993). The latter approach, more suitable for making large scale comparisons and generating hypotheses, has been adopted by most of the existing research. However, conclusions based on this approach is generally less convincing because the analysis is based on aggregated data. Ecologic studies can further be divided into two types, geographical and longitudinal (Levin, 2006). Compared with the longitudinal studies, the geographic studies require less data and it has been more commonly used. More longitudinal studies have been conducted in recent years as time series suicide data became more available (Miller et al., 2006; Siegel & Rothman, 2016). Regardless of the adopted method, the published studies have rather consistently shown significant and positive association between SRs, particularly firearm SRs, and the level of the household firearm ownership in the United States.

Further, most U.S.-based geographical ecological studies investigated either the association between SRs and firearm density or the effects of firearm regulations on SRs, and these studies relied mainly on correlation analysis and ordinary least squared (OLS) regression analysis to examine the relationship. One gap in the literature is that, though the spatial dependency in SRs has long been recognized (Balint et al., 2014; Helbich et al., 2012; Wasserma and Stack 1995), the effect has yet to be explicitly modeled in the studies of the relationship between SRs and household firearm ownership. Thus, the major objective of this study is to examine whether spatially-informed regression models can provide more robust model estimation. We collected and used the most recent SR data that were available to us when conducting this study. We controlled the major covariates in our regression models based on literature review and data availability. We intended to answer two research questions: 1) Do spatially-informed regression models perform better than the OLS models? 2) To what extent do county-level SRs (all, firearm and non-firearm) relate to state-level firearm ownership, after controlling other covariates in the models?

In the following sections, we first conduct a brief literature review, which is followed by an introduction of our data, modeling strategy, and models. We then present, interpret and compare the model results. We finally summarize the major findings, discuss the limitations, and propose future directions of this study before ending the paper with a short conclusion.

Section snippets

The suicide-firearm connection

Many suicide behaviors are impulsive by nature. The impulsiveness of many firearm related suicide attempts means that the risk period is likely be short-lived and many suicidal individuals are not determined to kill themselves. This fact provides the basis for the so-called means reduction for suicide prevention, that is, suicide can be prevented by reducing the availability and accessibility of the most lethal means (Peterson, Peterson, O’Shanick, & Swann, 1985; Chapdelaine et al., 1991;

The outcome variable: suicide rates

The SR data were collected from the Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS, 2019) maintained by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (USCDC). For this study, we obtained age-adjusted and smoothed SR data (all, firearm, and non-firearm, aSR, fSR, and nfSR afterward) at the county (or equivalent) level in the 48 conterminous states between 2008 and 2014 (USCDC, 2019). The District of Columbia was

Methods

In this study, we began with building basic models and gradually moved to more complicated ones. So, we built OLS models first, and two forms of SAR models next, and HSAR models the last. Model diagnostic statistics were used to compare and evaluate these models so that the best modeling approach could be determined. In addition, separate individual models were built for the three outcomes variables, aSR, fSR, and nfSR.

A SAR model takes two general forms: spatial lag (SARlag) and spatial error

Exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA)

The county-level SRs (aSR, fSR, and nfSR) were mapped and represented in Fig. 1. Overall, they were notably higher in the West and Midwest (except for most of California and Washington), and along the Appalachian Mountains. In addition, the spatial disparity of the SRs was more pronounced for fSR than for nfSR. Descriptive statistics of all the variables were summarized in Table 1.

The histograms of the raw SRs indicated that the data were right-skewed. To reduce the skewness, the Box-Cox

Discussion

The major findings of this study are summarized as follows. First, by explicitly accounting for the spatial effect in SR data, the SARlag model was superior to the classic OLS model. In addition, the HSAR model was found not to be significantly better than the SARlag model despite its designed conceptual advantages. One possible explanation is that most of the state-level spatial dependence has already been explained by the county-level effect. Second, the state-level firearm ownership was

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Wei Tu: Supervision, Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - original draft. Hoehun Ha: Data curation, Investigation, Writing - review & editing. Weifeng Wang: Methodology, Formal analysis, Software. Liang Liu: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - review & editing.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Lingling Chen for providing research assistance for the manuscript. We would also like to thank the editor of Applied Geography and the two anonymous referees for their insightful comments and constructive criticism. The analyses and opinions in this article are entirely the responsibility of the authors.

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