COLUMN: Lorne Gunter

BYLINE: Lorne Gunter

SOURCE: The Edmonton Journal

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Suicide-by-gun decline meaningless: Statistically speaking, people who didn't shoot themselves used a rope

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A couple of friends of mine, a university professor on the West Coast and an opposition researcher on Parliament Hill, have recently been poking around in Statistics Canada's suicide figures. Sure it's morbid, but what they have found is fascinating -- even telling.

The total number of suicides in Canada increased 13.4 per cent between 1991 and the end of 1999. There were 4,074 deaths ruled suicides in the last year of the 1990s, versus 3,593 in the first year.

Male suicides outnumber female suicides by nearly four-to-one. But the rate of female suicides is rising faster -- up 18.3 per cent through the 1990s, versus 12.1 per cent for men. In only one category do the raw numbers of female suicides approach that of males: suicides by drug overdose. Overall, the number of suicides by overdose "remained stable," according to my pals, 548 in 1991, 542 in 1999. And the male/female split is always close to 50/50.

Suicides by drowning are also reasonably evenly split between men and women. And male jumpers outnumber female by only about two-to-one. All other methods are male-dominated, especially suicides by firearms, in which men outnumber women 20-to-one.

Suicides by inhalation of poisonous gas increased substantially -- by 46.4 per cent -- between 1991 and 1995, then fell back to near where they began. Over the decade they rose by just 5.7 per cent, less than the rise in total population, which was 10.7 per cent over the same period.

That means, even though deaths by asphyxiation went up, they really went down. When the percentage rise of any incident is lower than the percentage rise of the overall population, the rate of that incident declines.

The number of Canadians was growing faster than the number of Canadians killing themselves with exhaust fumes, so the number of suicides by inhalation per 1,000 people dropped.

(See why I'd be lousy at writing textbooks for statistics classes?)

Suicides by drowning remained stable, as did suicides with knives. Suicides by "other methods," which my gruesome buddies explain is people "lying in front of a moving object, fire or crashing a motor vehicle," increased a significant 58 per cent.

Decline a Mirage

Then comes firearms suicides. There were more than 1,100 of them -- 1,110 to be exact -- in 1991, but just 807 of them in 1999. That's a decline of more than one-quarter.

If you're Allan Rock, or Anne McLellan, or Martin Cauchon -- i.e., if you are a former or current Liberal Justice Minister -- that's it, that's all you need to hear. You created the federal gun registry in the 1990s, or you presided over its Topsy-like growth (and hid the Topsy-like expenditure growth from Parliament), or you are just a clueless caretaker Justice minister who never fully understood the registry, but knows it plays well with voters in your native Quebec.

One day or another, you hear that the national suicide rate declined while your registry was consuming money and police resources the way a shark devours swimmers, and -- being the good Liberal that you are -- you quickly jump to take full credit for the decline.

If you're Allan Rock, you immediately say something like "See, see. I told you it would work. Look, that registry is saving 300 lives a year." (Of course, also being Allan Rock, you have to back down from that number in a matter of hours, because not even your fellow-travellers at the shriekingly anti-gun Coalition for Gun Control believe it. You later restate it as 124 saved lives per year. Not 123 or 125. You are very specific -- 124.)

If you are Anne McLellan, you blame the whole mess on Allan Rock. Never mind that at least half of the overspending occurred during your tenure as minister, and that you concealed the unexpected costs from Parliament. And you fall back on the theme you clung to during your tenure as Justice Minister, that at least the registry was helping promote a "culture of safety."

But the fly in your soothing salve, if you're a Liberal, is suicides by hanging.

Remember? Overall suicides went up during the 1990s. I mentioned that above. But I have also mentioned that most methods of committing suicide saw little or no growth, nor decline during the past decade. And firearms suicides have gone down, significantly.

The difference is suicides by hanging. There were 1,034 of them a year at the start of the 1990s, and a staggering 1,755 of them at the end, a 70-per-cent increase.

Canadians didn't stop killing themselves because the Liberals built an incinerator called the Canadian Firearms Centre, then shovelled a billion dollars into its roaring maw. In fact, they didn't stop killing themselves at all.

As people who are determined to kill themselves always have, when confronted with difficulties finding their life-taking weapon of choice, they switched to another mode. The registry hasn't stopped Canadians from killing themselves, it's merely made them switch to nooses from guns.

Perhaps the registry has prevented Canada from developing a "gun culture," but if that's true, then the registry may be blamed for our rapidly growing "rope culture."