Suicide is a major public health problem in the United States. In 1980 nearly 27,000 persons took their own lives, making suicide the 10th most common cause of death overall and the third most common cause among adolescents and young adults. Given that 57 percent of the cases of suicide in the United States involve firearms, much attention has been focused on the relation between the availability of firearms and the rates of suicide in communities. Citing the frequently impulsive nature of suicidal urges and the high case-fatality rate from injuries inflicted by firearms as compared with other methods of suicide, some persons have urged gun control as a means of reducing suicide rates.

One method of evaluating the potential effect of gun-control laws on suicide rates in the United States is through comparisons with the situation in other countries. However, such comparisons of suicide rates and degrees of gun control are usually flawed because of the presence of many differing socioeconomic, cultural, and behavioral factors.

We studied the relation between firearm regulations and rates of suicide in two urban areas of the Pacific Northwest: King County, Washington, and the Vancouver metropolitan area, British Columbia. Although these two areas are similar in many ways, they have taken very different approaches to the regulation of handguns.