Japan has a high suicide rate because it isn't considered taboo like in the USA and Japanese insurance policies pay out for suicide. For someone that has run up a large debt it is considered honorable for the debtor to kill themselves so that their family can use the insurance payout to settle the debt.
The difference between guns and other substitutes is the effectiveness of a gun and the fact there is no chance to change one's mind once the trigger is pulled. Someone that attempts suicide by drug overdose has time to change their mind and summon help. That is one reason that rural white males have such high suicide rates. The most popular suicide method for men is shooting oneself with a firearm. 85% succeed in killing themselves. The most popular method for women is poisoning with pills. Pills have a 2% success rate.
If the USA wants to tackle death by firearms the number one target should be reducing firearm suicides. Some research on the topic may be useful.
I hate to say it like heck but more studies are not going to come up with a magic bullet that causes 30000k per year to stop trying to kill themselves unless you remove the underlying causes. Deaths by suicide and by crime have more or less devastated families and friends. Like war, causal factors in suicides have been known for centuries in the West since ancient Greece. And by and large, society at this time has more or less decided that we will ignore the underlying causes: the disintegration of family and friends, the move away from religion, the media and politicians preaching doom and end of the world statements, the lack of meaningful participation in society for a lot of folks, the scapegoating of those society deems not in favor with said media, academia, and politicians, the financial and health woes of individuals including terminal illness, and so on. The cause is that there is widespread hopelessness for various individuals in a large swath of the public in civilized countries which is also indicated by falling birth rates among the native populations. While historically compared with other times, as a society, we have never had it so good materially, a substantial number of people feel a void in their lives that leads to destructive behavior either to themselves or society. Ironically, the Roman Empire demonstrated a similar death wish when its standard of living would not be repeated for nearly two millennia.
Studies are the traditional placebo by the policy community uses to recommend policies that they like and conduct more studies which provide work to those doing them. It may also provide politicians with a few policy recommendations that for the most part will be buried and ignored unless quick and easy to implement (which are usually ineffective).
Unfortunately, laws regarding firearms are an easy reach for the medical community, ambitious politicians, and non-gun owners as it does not affect them and any policy failure can always be followed by if the laws were even tougher without "loopholes" that gun owners call constitutional rights. Rinse and repeat as needed until no guns are allowed but the problem persists which means that you go after other easy targets such as substance abuse. Substance abuse, both legal and illegal, increases the risk of suicide. But, substance abuse is similar to suicide as it has multiple causal factors which are difficult to fix by laws and studies.
It more or less made my point above in a post in that Japanese males, despite lack of firearms, somehow manage to kill themselves in large numbers because that to them is an acceptable option. Romans also did quite well figuring out ways to kill themselves without firearms with similar societal approval. Today, a rather repellent feature of the internet is finding easy ways of all sorts of self harm or committing mayhem. A favorite way among South Koreans is carbon monoxide poisoning and jumping from heights. In the U.S., the ready availability of Fentanyl or other street drugs offers an option. Belgium allows physician assisted suicide which apparently why it has a high levels of suicides. Chinese uses insecticides and other industrial poisons.
Suicide is a problem throughout the civilized and civilizing world (not that you would know it if you are informed by the media) and ironically some of the worst places to live apparently have low suicide rates such as Afghanistan. Here is the crux of the issue, if society banned and removed all firearms today, leaving aside the explosion of violent crime that would ensue, I predict that you would see little if no movement on suicide numbers but rather a shift in means of doing so.
Dealing with suicide as a policy area is like restoring function to our inner cities, everyone knows more or less what has to be done but society in general is unwilling to do so because sacred cows will have to be gored. For example, a group of about 2500 to 10000 gang members are driving most of the horrendous violent crime rate in Chicago. If they were eliminated via a harsh application of the death penalty (no outside replacements would be allowed) and everyone accepted that as a viable option, then deaths by homicide would drop tremendously in subsequent years. If you wish for a more humane solution, you ship them to Johnson's Atoll in the Pacific or incarcerate them in a new Super Max for belonging to a gang.
But, the center of dysfunction existing in Chicago would eventually spawn a replacement of these individuals because A) people still want to do illegal drugs and do illegal things, B) a certain percentage of people have nurture and nature issues that will predispose them toward violent behavior to others for power and pleasure, C) you will still have the dysfunctional schools, families of a sort, joblessness, and so on.
This is not to preach hopelessness but that politicians and bureaucracies (even voters) simply do not handle difficult multifaceted problems that will take years to resolve very well. The overwhelming incentive in our democracy is to do a policy, declare the problem solved for now, and move on.
Remember, Just Say No is an example--just how well did that work over time? Despite the derision that phrase gets today, the government through the political system tried its best along with academia, medical experts, media, the law, and so on to eliminate the use of harmful drugs in society.
Did it work? Well, it worked for those persuadable and heroin and cocaine consumption dropped but obviously the whole policy complex was blindsided by crack cocaine in the 1990's, The policy system adjusted to fight that and now we have the return of heroin and now fentanyl along with other illegal drugs and governments have given up essentially on marijuana. Thus, Kipling's God of the Copybook Headings returns more or less. The problem is human nature, not its tools, and the absence of love, kindness, and caring in society, including its "losers", is beyond the power of the policy establishment to fix.
In such a situation, I give a few gun related policy examples that will do little to resolve the issue for society. For example, take safe storage laws--this is not going to stop a determined person with a lot of time and an angle grinder or in some cases a crowbar. Another favorite, more mental health screenings--the incidence of mental illness has not demonstrated a surge in numbers that we see in suicide rates over recent years. Most people with mental health issues do not kill themselves. Ironically, diverting policy attention and money into screenings as a sorting mechanism for firearm ownership both discourages people from seeking help and work poorly with too many false positives. The result is that it takes away liberty from those with no intentions of hurting themselves without addressing the primary issue of suicide. In a satirical vein, maybe we should dose everyone with anti-depressants that have trauma and promote self esteem to children regardless of their behavior? More or less some psychologists have held that a majority of the population is mentally ill at one time or another so why not. Well, a fair number of anti-depressants warn of side effects including suicidal thoughts in some and self esteem raising seems to have backfired in creating brittle narcissists that cannot adjust to adverse opinions and circumstances. I can go on and on as I have done policy research in the past.
A favorite simple solution by policymakers, interest groups, and politicians are new laws to address complex problems. However, new laws that ignore individuals' free agency do little to drain the swamp so to speak. Laws are always tempting solutions to politicians, especially if they only impinge on freedom--not a person's money, because the politician can point to the law and argue that the problem was solved. Voters do not mind imposing on other people's liberty because they do not see themselves in the same light. In a few years, when the fact that the problem was not solved comes about, the politician can point to the failure as that the law unfortunately was not strict enough and more laws are needed. Far too many voters have swallowed this line time and again. That failure of a particular policy means that you need to double down on that policy rather than abandoning it. People simply cannot abide sunk costs on a mistake.
In this issue, doctors and medical researchers figure out medical ways to treat a condition which ignores why the condition exists in the first place. That is what their training and outlook is but being a physician to society versus an individual usually loses something in the translation. This approach also ignores that people contemplating suicide have agency, they have choice, and they can choose in some degree to not do it.
