Suicide is an unfortunate reality that we live with. Regrettably, often times a person will commit suicide with a firearm. While suicide is tragic, it is generally not relevant to the gun control debate. All too often organizations that push for more gun control legislation will inflate their statistics with lives lost to suicide when it bears no relevance to the proposed legislation. This is a rather disturbing misuse of data to push the gun control agenda.

We believe that we need to be transparent with the data and honest with how we use it. While we don’t want to see people take their own lives, we also believe it is wrong to push for limiting people’s rights based on this data. Proponents of gun control will tout the total number of gun deaths as the reason to restrict access to certain types of firearms and accessories, but it is dishonest. Suicide makes up 63% of the total number of gun deaths over a 5-year average as shown by the Giffords Law Center using data gathered from the CDC’s WISQARS Fatal Injury Data reports. The legislation that is often in hot debate usually has nothing to do with 63% of the data they use to make their case for more gun control. The case for gun control falls largely in the realm of homicide, and even that position is hard to defend as we explain in more detail on the Homicide page.