Women are more likely to die by suicide if an adult in their homes owns a gun, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Northeastern and Stanford Universities.
The study is among the largest of its kind, as researchers examine “secondhand” exposure to guns among 9.5 million women in California over 12-years and two months. The study found that women living with handgun owners are nearly 50 percent more likely to die by suicide.
None of the women in the study owned handguns, and all started out living with at least one other adult in a handgun-free household. From October 2004 through December 2016, over 330,000 began living with handgun owners because someone they lived with lawfully became a new handgun owner.
During the 12-year study period, a total of 293,959 women died. Of those deaths, 2197 died of suicide, 337 of which were suicides by firearm.
Researchers report that a firearm was used in 31 of the 64 suicides among women residing with handgun owners, and 306 of the 2133 suicides among those residing in households with no gun owners.
Nearly all studies that have assessed household-level risk report only aggregate risk, which represents a weighted mean of the risk for firearm owners and owners residing in the same household. However, earlier studies have not isolated the risk for non-gun owners.
There was an influx of gun ownership during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to researchers, a less obvious outcome of the spike in firearm sales that began in March 2020 is that millions of non-owners were exposed to household firearms for the first time, most of who are women and children.
Researchers estimate that women in these newly exposed households would be approximately 1.5 times as likely to die by suicide today compared with before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Smaller studies on the same subject matter suggest a greater than 3-fold increase in the risk of dying by suicide among adults who became new gun owners. The research team in an earlier study found that women who personally own handguns were seven times more likely to die by suicide than women who don’t own handguns.
