Clinicians have an obligation to report to state or territory police any concerns about risk of harm from patients with access to firearms. Dementia is an under-recognised medical problem which may increase the risk of firearm injury or violence in those with such access. There are no guidelines for clinicians regarding mandatory screening for access to firearms, and currently the onus is on th...

IC ER SPTIVES On contentious issues such as gun control, where advocacy groups on both sides claim to have the weight of public opinion behind them, polling can help clarify what Americans really think. Three decades of polling have painted a clear picture of public opinion about gun control. These polls show that public support for the regulation of firearms is strong, deep, and widespread. La...

CDC’s Injury and Violence Prevention and Control: http://www.cdc.gov/injury/ Conducts and reports on research related to a variety of causes of violence and injury, including motor vehicle crashes, falls, homicides, illnesses, and more. The CDC’s firearms-related injury research was defunded by Congress in 1996 (see Kellermann & Rivara, 2012 in Public Health Policy & Law section below) and only...

Homicide is a relatively infrequent event in Australia, and homicides followed by the suicide of the perpetrator occur about twenty times each year. Analyses of these cases, however, can be instructive. This Trends and Issues paper shows that most murder-suicides in Australia occur in the context of intimate and/or family relationships, and are more likely to involve firearms than are other cat...

For the second straight year, large cities on the U.S. are experiencing an alarming increased [sic] in homicides, mostly committed with firearms. Philadelphia reported 406 homicides in 2006, giving it the highest rate of homicides among the ten largest cities (27.8 per 100,000 people). This trend has renewed interest in policies to limit the availability of firearms. However, the effectiveness ...

Background: Discussing safe storage of firearms, including access, during times crisis with veterans in primary care settings may enhance suicide prevention efforts. However, veteran attitudes toward such discussions are not well understood. The goal this study is to understand the perspectives on discussing firearms safety staff visits. Methods: Individual semistructured inte...

OBJECTIVE The study tested the hypotheses that (i) the rate of suicide by firearms among youth (aged 10-19 years) is increasing at a greater rate than rates of suicide by other methods; (ii) the rate of youth suicide in rural New South Wales is significantly higher than those in urban areas; and (iii) the increase in youth suicide by means of firearms is occurring at a greater rate in rural mal...

In 1997, Australia implemented a gun buyback program that reduced the stock of firearms by around one-fifth (and nearly halved the number of gun-owning households). Using differences across states, we test whether the reduction in firearms availability affected homicide and suicide rates. We find that the buyback led to a drop in the firearm suicide rates of almost 80%, with no significant effe...