Symposia
Suicide and Self-Injury
Mike Anestis, PhD
Executive Director
New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center
West Piscataway, New Jersey
Firearms account for half of all suicides in the US. Firearms in the home increase the risk for suicide for all household members and this risk is further increased when firearms are stored unsafely. Despite this, safe firearm storage remains rare. Furthermore, those most likely to die by firearm suicide often belong to groups that avoid mental healthcare and underreport thoughts of suicide. The need for scalable primary prevention interventions is thus clear. Two such interventions – lethal means counseling (LMC) and safe firearm storage messaging – have received increasing attention.
In this presentation, I will present results from Project Safe Guard, a factorial randomized controlled trial of LMC among firearm owning members of the Mississippi National Guard (n = 232). This trial tested the utility of both LMC and the provision of cable locks in prompting changes in firearm storage behavior during a 3- and 6- month follow-up period. Those who received cable locks adopted cable lock use more than control participants and this difference was maintained throughout the follow-up period. Furthermore, those who received LMC increased their use of safe firearm storage relative to control, with differences maintained throughout follow-up.
I will then present the results from a study of firearm owning active duty service members (n = 719), recruited via IPSOS, in which participants were randomized to view 1 of 12 visual messages on safe firearm storage. The messages were similar across conditions, but varied in the purported occupation of the messenger, the presence/absence of text validating the perspective of firearm owners, and the presence/absence of text validating the drive for home protection. Openness to a variety of firearm storage practices increased across all conditions; however, the magnitude of those differences varied by condition and storage type. Most consistently, service members demonstrated significantly greater increases in openness to safe firearm storage when the messenger’s purported occupation was security forces.
Ultimately, these results highlight promising preliminary data for several scalable interventions for firearm suicide prevention, both of which are currently being adapted and examined widely within the Department of Defense. Implications of greater use of these tools will be discussed.