Guns and Suicides

ABSTRACT

There is a consensus in the literature that the ratio of suicides committed with guns to total suicides is the best indirect measure of gun ownership. However, such a proxy is not accurate for any locality with low population density in view that suicides are rare events. To circumvent this issue, we exploit the socioeconomic characteristics of the suicide victims in order to come up with a novel proxy for gun ownership. We assess our indicator using suicide micro-data from the Brazilian Ministry of Health between 2000 and 2010.

KEYWORDS:

• Crime
• Firearm
• Fixed effects
• Logit
• Panel data
• Regularization
• Violence

Acknowledgments

We thank Dani Gamerman, Duda Mendes, Aureo de Paula, Vladimir Ponczek, Rodrigo Soares, Andrea Tesei, and Rodrigo Zeidan for helpful discussions as well as seminar participants at Queen Mary, ANPEC 2013, and ESTE 2015 for their valuable comments. Coelho and Fernandes thank financial support from CNPq (302272/2014-3). We bear full responsibility for any errors.

Notes

1 Although we shrink only fixed effects, one could also regularize other coefficients (see Koch 2014).

2 The definition of micro-region is from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), consisting of homogeneous groups of neighboring municipalities with similar socio-economic and natural characteristics. IBGE pays particular attention to the production structures of each municipality and to the spatial interaction and communication between them in order to cluster the 5570 municipalities in Brazil into 558 micro-regions and then into 137 meso-regions.

3 The legal age was 21 years old, but it changed to 25 years old after the gun control act of December 2003.

Additional information

Funding

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico Tecnológico [302272/2014-3].