

Guns, Suicides and Natural Experiments - tokenadult
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/12/suicide-firearms-and-natural-experiments.html

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memracom
It has always seemed to me that many of these school massacres were actually a
suicide event. Of course it is always hard to figure out the actual intent of
a shooter when the event ends in the shooter's death, but the possibility of a
connection really makes one wonder if suicide prevention activities would also
have an impact on school shootings.

Although most of the news coverage of school shootings goes to events in the
USA, they do happen in other countries and some of those countries might be
more willing than the USA, to improve suicide prevention activities, and to
include school shootings in their measure of effectiveness. It might take a
few decades to gather enough data to be sure of whether or not it works, but
long term experiments are still valuable and we need to do more of them.

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tokenadult
Link to the peer-reviewed empirical study that is the basis for this blog post
by the study author:

[http://elsarticle.com/18AQUBF](http://elsarticle.com/18AQUBF)

Justin Thomas Briggs, Alexander Tabarrok, Firearms and suicides in US states,
International Review of Law and Economics, Volume 37, March 2014, Pages
180-188, ISSN 0144-8188.

[http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.irle.2013.10.004](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.irle.2013.10.004).

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0144818813...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014481881300077X)

