Older men are 13 times more likely to die by firearm suicide than women, but a new study led by Boston University School of Public Health in collaboration with the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs has found that suicides by gun are increasing rapidly among older women.
Firearms were involved in nearly 40 percent of suicides among older women from 2014-2023, up from 34.9% in 2014, according to the study in JAMA Network Open. Women represent nearly half of all new gun owners in the United States; as female gun ownership surges across many states, these findings highlight a need to better understand the immediate and long-term consequences of firearm suicides among older women, as well as develop tailored interventions to mitigate firearm suicides among all older adults.
"Based on the most recent decade of federal data on firearm mortality, we found alarmingly high proportions of firearm suicides to all suicides among both older women and older men, and the trend among older women outpaced that of older men," said study lead and corresponding author Dr. Ziming Xuan, professor of community health sciences at BUSPH.
The research team, which also included senior author Dr. Mark Kaplan, research professor of social welfare at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and coauthor William Xuan, a student at Brookline High School in Brookline, Massachusetts, analyzed firearm suicide data among older adults from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The team calculated the ratio of firearm suicides to all suicides, by sex and by state, for each year between January 2014 and December 2023.
Read the full story about the firearm suicide data analysis from the Luskin Center.
