When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the US, it wasn’t just a deadly virus that swept the country. It also ushered in a period of unprecedented access to firearms.
New gun ownership surged, particularly in Black, Latino and Asian American communities, alongside rising anti-Asian hate crimes, police violence and a general climate of fear. In the past, spikes in gun purchases tended to occur in conservative states, in response to changes in gun policy. “For the first time ever,” said Paul Nestadt, a suicide researcher and co-director of the Johns Hopkins suicide prevention working group, “there were more guns bought in blue states than red states.”
The devastating ripple effects of that spike in new gun ownership are now becoming apparent in rising firearm suicide rates among children and teens over the past four years. In 2022, nearly 27,000 people died by gun suicide – the highest on record – and young people of color bore the brunt of this hike. For the first time, the gun suicide rate among Black teens surpassed that among white teens. Firearm rates rose 63% among young Latinos and 71% among young Asian Americans over the past decade and a half, the latter being the largest growth of any racial or ethnic group.
The increase is driven as much by compounding racial trauma as unfettered access to firearms, suicide researchers and community organizers say. Informed prevention and intervention strategies, they said, should focus on destigmatizing mental illness and fostering an understanding that suicide isn’t just a mental health issue but also an impulsive act of violence.
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In May 2021, a month after he turned 16, Brian Bunch walked down to the basement of his Baltimore, Maryland, home and retrieved a pistol belonging to his father – an army veteran and a longtime gun owner – from a locked safe. While waiting for a video game to download, he fidgeted with the gun and accidentally discharged it. Footage from the family’s surveillance camera showed Bunch in a state of panic for the next five minutes.
Moments before he took his life, Bunch texted his parents that he loved them.
Trina Bunch, 46, described her son as an outgoing teen who had no known mental health issues. A talented baseball and basketball player, he dreamed of attending Howard University and developing video games.
Bunch said she didn’t regret keeping guns in the house, but she wished she’d taken added precautions. “I do regret making the assumption that my house was a safe space because we had a safe,” she said. “If I could do it over I’d definitely have a secondary lock.”
What continues to haunt and shock her, she said, was the impulsiveness of her son’s action. “We can only assume he just panicked and his 16-year-old mind thought it was the only way out,” she said.
Firearm suicides account for nearly half of suicide deaths among children and adolescents, and suicide risk is more than four times higher in households with firearms. About 30 million children under 18 live in homes with at least one firearm, and 5 million live in homes where at least one firearm is both loaded and unlocked.
Nestadt said that suicides, particularly youth suicides, are often impulse calls. A widely cited study found that 87% of people who attempted suicide made the call within the day. Many act within the hour, Nestadt said, and will use any means available to them. The impulsive nature of suicides also means they’re not inevitable: seven of 10 people who survive a suicide attempt and receive medical care afterward make no further attempts.
From 2019 to 2021, the overall suicide rate among white people stayed roughly the same but increased 17% among Black people and 11% among the youth, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These are two demographics that historically have had lower suicide risk, Nestadt said. During the same period, suicide deaths by every method other than firearms, including overdose and suffocation, dropped by 8%.
During the early months of the pandemic, more than 5 million people became first-time gun owners, according to the trade organization National Shooting Sports Foundation. Gun ownership rose by nearly 60% among Black Americans and 71% among Asian Americans – two groups that historically had low gun ownership rates. Nestadt noted that 40% of buyers during this time were first-time gun owners living in urban, liberal enclavesand less likely to be trained in firearm storage practices.
Means reduction remains the most effective suicide prevention strategy, Nestadt said. In post-war Britain, for example, domestic carbon monoxide poisoning was the leading method of suicide. In the 1960s, after the country replaced coal gas with natural gas ovens, suicides fell rapidly. At the turn of the century, a reduction in the size of painkiller packages led to a 22% decrease in suicide deaths from paracetamol and aspirin.
“In the US, we know that gun access may be the most important barrier to suicide prevention,” he said. “It’s very hard to pass laws to restrict access to guns. But when we do, we see a drop in gun suicides.”
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But it’s not just access to firearms that are fueling the rise in youth suicides, experts say. In an August report for the Johns Hopkins center for gun violence solutions, suicide researchers Janel Cubbage and Leslie Adams also found that wide-ranging discrimination and generational trauma can be detrimental to the mental health of Black teens.
“The aspects of racism for this generation are quite varied,” Adams said. “School, family environment, exposure to community violence – the hopelessness is very pervasive.” Mass incarceration and police violence, she said, also disrupts familial ties that keep young people connected to their community.
One important step to Black youth suicide prevention is lowering financial barriers to mental health services, and connecting at-risk adolescents to Black therapists who understand their personal experiences and struggles, Cubbage said. (The vast majority of practicing US psychologists are white: only 3% are Black, 4% are Asian, and 7% are Latino, according to the American Psychological Foundation.)
Working with religious and community leaders to create supportive spaces for young people is another crucial strategy. “The Black church is a [pillar] in our community,” Cubbage said, “so it’s a natural partner in suicide prevention work.” However, youth attendance has dropped in recent decades, and the church hasn’t always been a safe space for LGBTQ+ youth, she added.
T-Kea Blackman, a peer recovery specialist and founder of the organization Black People Die by Suicide Too, said suicide had long been missing from the mental health conversation in the Black community. People wouldn’t broach the subject, she said, unless she opened up first about her own struggles with suicide ideation. “It’s talked about in a reactive way and not proactive way,” she said. “Sometimes it’s considered a character flaw.”
Changing this mindset through peer support groups and other community-building efforts is crucial, Blackman said. Since the fall, her organization has hosted a series of virtual sessions with a dozen suicide survivors. These meet-ups were “super important for sharing ideas about coping mechanisms, and showing what’s possible”, she said. People get hope from these groups.”
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While rates have risen in recent years, suicide among children of color didn’t begin with the pandemic – which advocates say highlights the importance of access to mental health resources in their communities.
In 2014, 14-year-old David Phan shot himself at his Utah high school with his parents’ pistol. As a queer Vietnamese American teen on a nearly all-white campus, Pham was bullied by classmates for his racial and sexual identity, though he never shared his ordeals with his family, said his cousin, Than-Tung Than-Trong.
Than-Trong said like many other families in Utah, Phan’s parents embraced gun culture. Phan had been going on hunting trips and to the gun range since he was a child, she said, but his parents never let him use the gun without their supervision. They didn’t know when or how he figured out the combination to the safe. Phan’s parents got rid of all their guns after his death.
Joel Wong, a psychology professor at Indiana University Bloomington who studies suicides in the Asian American community, said the group has historically experienced relatively low rates of gun violence and gun suicides because few Asian countries have a strong culture of gun ownership. (Research shows that means not involving firearms were, and remain, the most common method of suicide among Asian Americans.) But the trend is changing with the younger generation, he said.
“Unfortunately, as the Asian American population becomes more US-born, you’ll see greater exposure to white culture,” Wong said. “You’ll see a greater connection to gun culture.”
In a 2021 study of thousands of suicide notes written by Asian Americans, Wong found that youth decedents expressed regret toward family members. “It’s sentiments like, ‘I’m so sorry I’m leaving. I’m so sorry I can’t take care of you,’” Wong said. “But their feelings of suicidality were so intense they overrode those obligations.” Yet, he said, the desire to care for loved ones is also a strong protective factor against suicide: families can learn to provide certain words of affirmation to at-risk youths. “You want them to know their presence matters on this earth,” Wong said. “‘We care about you. You’re not a burden to us.’”
At the same time, framing suicide not solely as a mental health issue is crucial when considering intervention at a legislative level, Wong said. While some suicide attempts are driven by depression, he added, many are impulsive and unrelated to any psychiatric disorders. One big risk factor that can trigger suicides, for example, is intimate partner problems. “If you frame suicide as an act of violence, then removing access to lethal means is critical,” Wong said.
Ravi Parekh and Aaron Pandian, two seniors at the University of Texas, founded a campus organization in 2021 to destigmatize mental health issues in the south Asian American community after their close friend and roommate Farhan Towhid shot himself and his family in a murder-suicide.
Their group, the Mental Health Initiative for South Asians, is focused on community engagement and education, creating peer support networks and mental health training for parents and religious leaders. It’s also developing a database with 12,000 south Asian providers – the largest network in the country – to implement in clinics, Parekh said.
“When we reached out to families, we learned there’s a clear gap in mental health knowledge and resources,” Pandian said. “We want to create a playbook to foster conversations between south Asian parents and youth.”
Sheila Wu, director at the Asian Pacific Counseling and Treatment Centers in Los Angeles, said there was a shortage of Asian mental health providers who understand the racial trauma that many Asian American adolescents experience, and schools often prioritize academics over students’ mental health needs.
“I always remind parents to make sure they know what kids are doing,” Wu said. “If kids are in their room being quiet, you need to be concerned.”
• In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK, the youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or email pat@papyrus-uk.org, and in the UK and Ireland Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
