rare vids like this not often get leaked to the internet but shooting range suicides happens more than you think.
Some shooting ranges have adopted policies to prevent suicides at their facilities. Little data have been available to guide them. Aim: We aimed to describe the incidence and characteristics of suicides at public shooting ranges. Method: We conducted text searches of 63,710 firearm suicides in the 16 states participating in the National Violent Death Reporting System from 2004 to 2015 to identify those occurring at public shooting ranges. Results: A total of 118 (or 0.18%) occurred at a shooting range, or 0.12 per million population. If that rate held for the nation as a whole, there would have been roughly 35 shooting range suicides per year during the study period. In total, 88% of decedents arrived alone. When gun ownership was noted, 86% of guns were rented from the range. In some cases, people drove to the range and took their lives in the parking lot with their own gun. Limitations: Our search strategy may have missed cases, and the data may not be nationally representative. Conclusion: Suicides at shooting ranges are rare. Policies that some ranges have adopted – such as allowing rentals only if the person is not alone – are responsive to the actual characteristics of these deaths and could potentially prevent most.
In the United States, where roughly one in three homes have firearms (Azrael, Cohen, Salhi, & Miller, 2018), public shooting ranges offer the public an opportunity to learn or improve their shooting skills, engage in recreational or competitive shooting, try new firearms, and socialize. Range masters are responsible for enforcing safe firearm handling rules to avoid unintentional injuries. According to newspaper reports, suicides have occurred at shooting ranges in many parts of the country, leading some range operators to voluntarily adopt new policies regarding who may rent a gun at their facilities (Kyle, 2014; Schuppe, 2018). A large retail chain in Florida ceased all gun rentals in response to a spate of suicides at their ranges (Curtis, 2014). Other ranges have instituted policies allowing people unknown to range personnel to rent guns only if accompanied by another person or if they have proof that they have received gun training. Still others require new customers to provide references from someone who can attest to their mental stability (Dallof, 2010).
We searched the peer-reviewed public health and social sciences literature and were unable to find any papers that estimate the incidence of suicides at shooting ranges or describe their characteristics. These events appear to be rare. A newspaper investigation in California reviewed coroner reports and identified 64 suicides at shooting ranges in the counties of Orange, Los Angeles, and San Diego from 2000 to 2012, for an average annual rate of .31 deaths for every million residents (Kyle, 2014). If that rate applied to the nation as a whole, then roughly 100 suicides per year would occur at shooting ranges, a fraction of the 23,854 firearm suicides recorded nationally in 2017 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2017). An industry market report estimates that there are over 7,000 public shooting ranges in the US (IBISWorld, 2019).
Like suicides by any method, those at ranges have tragic consequences for the decedent and his or her friends and family. They can also be traumatic for range personnel and other range users, cause temporary shutdowns that are costly to retailers, and expose some ranges to lawsuits. According to studies in the US and Australia, firearms have the highest fatality rate among suicide methods (Spicer & Miller, 2000; Spittal, Pirkis, Miller, & Studdert, 2012) and cause death more quickly than most other methods. Presumably, at least some range suicides occur when a person who does not have access to a firearm uses the gun range as a means of gaining access. Retailers have also conjectured that some individuals choose to end their lives at a shooting range rather than at home in order to insulate family members from the trauma of discovering their bodies.
In recent years, public health groups and firearm retailers have forged partnerships in many states to examine ways in which retailers can help reduce firearm suicides (Barber, Frank, & Demicco, 2017; Henn, Barber, & Hememway, 2019; Vriniotis, Barber, Frank, Demicco, & New Hampshire Firearm Safety Coalition, 2015). Projects have included distributing suicide awareness information to gun shop customers, at gun shows, in firearm classes, and in publications catering to gun owners. The information provides warning signs for suicide risk and advises storing household guns away from home, or making them inaccessible in some other way, until a household member at risk for suicide recovers. One role of public health groups in these efforts is to supply useful and actionable data.
This study uses data from the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) to estimate the incidence of shooting range suicides and to describe characteristics of the victims and incidents involved – particularly characteristics that may be useful to range operators as they weigh whether, or how, to change their range use policies to avoid a suicide at their facility.
Method
The NVDRS is a state-based reporting system coordinated and funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The system began collecting data in 2003, with six states participating, and has gradually expanded to a 50-state system today. The system is described in detail elsewhere (Paulozzi, Mercy, Frazier, Annest, & Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2004). Briefly, abstractors from the relevant state VDRS office gather data from the death certificate, law enforcement reports, and coroner/medical examiner reports on every violent death inflicted in their state, whether from homicide, suicide, injury of undetermined intent, or unintentional firearm injury. Abstracters code data on the decedents' demographics, the place where the incident occurred, the substances testing positive in postmortem toxicologic screens, the circumstances preceding the event, and the weapon or suicide method used. These variables are defined in the NVDRS coding manual (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2016). In addition, the abstracter writes two brief incident narratives that summarize the circumstances of the death as reported by law enforcement and by the coroner or medical examiner.
We obtained individual-level Researcher Access Data from the CDC in November 2017. Our use of the NVDRS data for epidemiologic research was approved by the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health Institutional Review Board. We used data from 16 states, including 13 that reported consistently from 2004 to 2015 (Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin), and three that did not report in 2004 but did so throughout the remainder of the period (Kentucky, New Mexico, and Utah).
Case Definition
We selected cases coded by the NVDRS abstractor as firearm suicides. Because the incident location variable does not have a code for shooting range, we conducted a text search in the incident narratives for the phrases shooting range, gun shop, gun range, rifle range, firing range, skeet, sportsman, gun club, and variants on those phrases. We then read the incident narrative to determine whether the case met our definition. Our intention was to include ranges that rent guns and that are open to the public (vs. open only to members) either all of the time or some of the time. We excluded ranges operated by police, military, or a private club, if the range did not have public shooting access. If the location were referred to as a shooting range, we accepted that as meeting our case definition, unless there was counter-evidence indicating that it was exclusively a non-public range. For all other terms (e.g., gun club, skeet), we applied a higher level of scrutiny and assumed the case was not a public range unless there was evidence to the contrary (e.g., the decedent rented a gun, or a Google search found that the only gun club in the zip code in which the incident occurred advertised public shooting hours). We accepted cases identified from the search term gun shop only if the narrative indicated the suicide occurred in a shooting area operated by the shop. Among the 118 cases included in our final data set, 86 included the phrase shooting range in the narrative and 32 were located using one of the other terms (usually gun range or firing range).
Coding
In addition to analyzing the abstractor-coded variables, we created four new variables based on reading the incident narratives: whether the gun was rented from the range, whether the decedent was alone or accompanied, whether he or she fired multiple shots or a single shot, and whether the shooting occurred directly in the shooting area or in an adjacent area like the parking lot. The owner of the gun was coded as either the range, the decedent, other (e.g., a friend or parent with whom the decedent was shooting), or unknown, based on information in three areas: (a) incident narratives, (b) an NVDRS variable that describes the relationship of the decedent to the owner of the gun, and (c) a free-text variable describing how the decedent obtained their firearm. These last two are usually unknown or blank for adult decedents, but occasionally were useful. If there was no mention that the decedent arrived at the shooting range with another person, and there was a detailed description of the incident (e.g., "Man rented a gun at a shooting range; surveillance video indicates that he shot several rounds before shooting himself"), we assumed he or she was alone. If there was virtually no information about the incident (e.g., "Decedent shot self at a shooting range,") we coded "Alone or accompanied" as "unknown."
Incidence Rates and Analysis
We calculated incidence rates both for shooting range suicides and for firearm suicides overall in the 16 NVDRS states from 2004 to 2015. For the denominators, we used the CDC WONDER website to obtain population estimates for each applicable demographic group in each participating state and each year in which the state participated in the NVDRS. For the numerator, we based counts on the state in which the incident occurred, rather than the state of the decedent's residence. We characterized the rural–urban status of the county in which the incident occurred using the National Center for Health Statistics' "Urban–Rural Classification Scheme for Counties." We also characterized the level of household gun ownership in the decedent's state of residence. This was based on 2004 data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the last year for which there are valid state-level estimates of gun ownership (Okoro et al., 2005). We classified states' household gun ownership level as low (under 20%), medium (30–39%), and high (40%+).
We tested for differences between firearm suicides overall and those occurring at shooting ranges using the chi-square statistic for categorical variables and the t test for mean age. All text searching was done in the SAS Institute JMP Pro Version 13, and analysis was performed in both JMP and StataCorp Stata/IC 15.0.
Results
Among a total of 63,710 people who took their lives with a firearm in participating states over the 12-year period, we identified 118 who did so at a shooting range, or two tenths of 1% of all firearm suicides. The overall incidence rate was 0.12 per million population. Applying that rate to the nation's population as a whole during the midpoint of the study period would yield an estimated 37 suicides at shooting ranges per year nationally. Applying the proportion of firearm suicides that occurred at a shooting range in the NVDRS states to total US firearm suicides during the study period would yield an estimated 35 shooting range suicides per year.
Decedents at shooting ranges were younger on average (mean age = 39.3 vs. 49.3, p = .001) than firearm suicide decedents overall. As noted in Table 1, people ages 50 and over made up roughly half (49%) of all firearm suicides but only 23% of shooting range suicides. Males made up 86% of both shooting range and overall firearm suicides. A higher proportion of shooting range decedents were an ethnicity other than White non-Hispanic (22% vs. 13%) compared with firearm suicides overall. When comparing by type of county in which the incident occurred, shooting range suicide rates were over 3 times lower in rural as opposed to metropolitan counties (0.04/million vs. 0.15/million), whereas overall firearm suicide rates were more than 2 times higher in rural counties compared with large metropolitan counties. People living in states with low gun ownership made up only 6% of all firearm suicides, but 21% of shooting range suicides (p < .001). Rates were higher in the last 3 years of the study period compared with earlier years for both shooting range suicides and all firearm suicides.
Table 1 Firearm suicides at shooting ranges vs. all locations by decedent demographics, urbanization level, state gun ownership level, and period: Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky,a Maryland, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Jersey, New Mexico,a North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah,a Virginia, and Wisconsin, 2004–2015.
