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Suicide rates are affected by many factors—psychiatric, biological, familial and situational. This paper focuses on one potential risk factor for completed suicide in the United States—the availability of firearms. Whether the availability of firearms might increase the rate of attempted suicide is not examined. This article is not an exhaustive review of every existing firearm-related suicide study. Rather, it provides a detailed review of the most commonly cited, representative, and thorough empirical studies in the published peer-reviewed literature relating firearms and suicide, focusing largely on the United States. The empirical studies reviewed are grouped according to whether the unit of analysis is the individual (e.g., case-control studies) or a population (e.g., ecological studies) and further divided depending on whether the analysis uses cross-sectional or time-series (longitudinal) data. We begin with a very brief …