ABSTRACT
Although some suicide scholars have proposed gun control measures as an indirect method of controlling suicide through law general studies of gun control usually give only the most cursory attention to suicide. To assess the potential for controlling suicide through gun control it is necessary to first gain some understanding of this extraordinary predominance of gun use among suicide methods. The foregoing leads to the inference that when people commit suicide with a gun, it is the result of a choice over other more available alternatives that the suicide passed by to use the preferred firearm. In any case, quite apart from explaining trends in suicidal gun use, the modeling hypothesis may help explain the extremely high degree to which shooting predominates as a method among completed suicides. In the high suicide older ages, males are substantially more likely than women to prefer guns, but this is less true at the younger ages.
