U.S. vs Canada: Suicide Edition

Here is an interesting look at suicides in Canada and the US, the long and skinny of it is that method has little effect on the rates. Anti-firearm types always claim that restrictive gun laws reduce suicide by gun, well they are telling the truth, only it’s a tiny slice of the truth, what really happens is that the people who wish to commit suicide will do it anyways.
I did Search and Rescue for the Coast Guard, I got to watch far to many people jump off of bridges and what a sudden impact with water does to the human body is not worth thinking about, even worse when they live for a couple of days after that. It’s also hard when the body is not found and the family can not have closure. We once rescued the same guy out of the Fraser river two days in a row. They would send him to hospital and they would release him, on the third day he went missing, wouldn’t be surprised if he was the donor of one of those missing feet. If you really care about suicide rates, forget method and go after the causes. The only thing that stops a person from taking their life from what I have seen is a strong interaction with empathetic person.



So on the whole then, the U.S. and Canada would appear to be very similar to one another where deaths caused by self-inflicted injuries are concerned. If Canada's population were identical to the United States, it would likely see the same number of suicides each year, or actually a bit more than that, given its slightly higher suicide rate.

Things change dramatically however when we consider the methods by which people in the U.S. and Canada have committed suicide in the years from 2000 through 2007

Read the rest at Political Calculations