Every house has a rope or a cord. Why would reducing access to guns matter when a person can always hang themselves?
Hangings are a major concern. The method is very available and can be relatively lethal. And yet, access to guns at home is still found to be a risk factor for suicide. Why? First, according to emergency department and death certificate data, the case fatality ratio (which means in a group of fatal and nonfatal cases the percent that are fatal) for suffocation suicides is lower than for firearms (69% for suffocation vs. 85% for firearms according to the CDC). But that’s emergency department data. Emergency department data are likely to overstate the case fatality ratio for suffocations and to be pretty accurate for firearms. For firearms, once the trigger is pulled, the outcome is virtually always death or a trip to the hospital. For suffocations, once the ligature is tightened, the attempter often has a small window of opportunity within which to change their mind without injury (and therefore without a trip to the hospital). A study of coroner records in England (Bennewith et. al., B
