What's Driving Male Suicide Rates? It's the Guns

It's not just about mental health or societal expectations

By: Jasir Rahman

As September comes to an end, so too does Suicide Prevention Month, a time dedicated to raising awareness about the deeply personal issues of mental health and suicide awareness. 

In 2022, nearly 50,000 Americans died from suicide, with the vast majority of victims being men. The CDC reports that men die from suicide at rates four times that of women.

While this disparity has driven forward genuinely productive dialogues about male mental health, it has also been used to forward problematic narratives that overlook women’s significant struggles with mental health and suicide.

Some media personalities, like Andrew Tate and Piers Morgan, have taken this disparity as an indication that patriarchal systems do not exist because men apparently suffer more from mental health.

Shockingly few acknowledge that women are three times more likely to have suicidal ideation, and three times as likely to attempt suicide than men. So, if women attempt suicide at higher rates, what is causing men to die at higher rates?

It’s not just about male mental health or undue societal expectations. It’s also about access to lethal means.

When most people think of gun violence they often think about mass shootings or urban violence. However, firearm suicide is actually the leading cause of deaths from gun violence. In 2022, over 48,000 Americans were killed by guns, with 27,000 of those deaths being firearm suicides. Examining firearm suicide deaths by gender, 7 men die for every 1 woman killed by firearm suicide.

Many jump to cultural explanations for this disparity. Recently, a countermovement of “anti-feminists” have charged that because the left blames men for the patriarchy — which they don’t believe exists — they are driven towards suicide. Others have blamed conceptions of masculinity that pressure men to internalize their emotions and engage in reckless behavior.

On either side, very few acknowledge firearm ownership as a driver of male suicide. 

In America, owning a firearm is associated with masculinity, security, and independence, and these cultural perceptions have driven gun ownership among men. Men are twice as likely to own firearms than women, and accordingly firearms are used in 60% of male suicides, but just 30% of female suicides.

This disparity in ownership has decreased as the gun industry has taken to marketing firearms more to women in the past couple decades. Since 2007, the rate of gun ownership among women has jumped from 13% to 22%, while rates of ownership for men have remained stagnant. At the same time, the rate of firearm suicide among women has increased faster than that of their male counterparts, increasing 20% from 2010 to 2020.

Access to firearms matters because suicide attempts using firearms result in death 90% of the time, making it the leading cause of suicide death. Lethality matters because when someone survives their suicide attempt there is a 90% chance they will not go on to die by suicide.

Even though suffocation/hanging are nearly as lethal (~85% fatality rate) and generally more accessible than buying a gun, people die from firearm suicide more than twice as often because it’s much easier to simply pull a trigger. And the more time one puts between the onset of a suicidal episode and the attempt, the less likely that they will decide to attempt suicide.

When people are in crisis, they need time and space to heal and get the help they need. When people in crisis have a gun under their bed or in a closet, it can take just seconds for a temporary moment of crisis to become a tragedy that lasts forever.

To truly address disparate rates of male suicide, we can’t just stop at discussions of mental health. We must also look at the means by which men are taking their own lives. We must address the gun suicide problem through policy that limits vulnerable individuals’ access to lethal means.

Extreme risk protection order (ERPO) laws that allow a court of law to temporarily prevent people in crisis from having access to lethal means have been proven to save lives. Studies of extreme risk laws in California and Connecticut have found that for every 22 extreme risk orders enacted, 1 life was saved from firearm suicide. Indiana’s ERPO law was associated with a 7.5% reduction in firearm suicides over the 10 years following its enactment in 2005.

There is no silver bullet for preventing the tragedy of suicide. It is a deeply personal issue, and it takes individualized support and care to heal when facing mental health struggles. We need to destigmatize mental health discussions and provide professional support for those who are in crisis. But addressing gun access through laws like ERPOs provides one last line of defense against the unthinkable.

Guns make it easy to let one’s impulses take over for just a moment — and just a moment is all it takes to make a mistake you can’t take back.

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Jasir Rahman is a senior at Rice University in Houston, TX, and a member of Team ENOUGH, Brady United Against Gun Violence’s youth organization.

Image by 👀 Mabel Amber, who will one day from Pixabay