Interesting report of a study on crime that shows the following:

Our key result shows that narrow election of a Republican local prosecutor leads to a reduction in all-cause mortality among the most criminal justice-involved demographic: young men ages 20 to 29 years old. This reduction is meaningful (9.8 fewer deaths per
100,000, or a 6.6% reduction) and conforms with the well-documented fact that criminal activity tends to peak in one’s twenties and decline quickly thereafter (Rocque et al., 2015). We then show that the mortality reduction is concentrated in deaths involving firearms, and heterogeneity analysis indicates a large reduction in firearm homicides among young Black men and a smaller reduction in firearm suicides/accidents among young White men. In relation to the opioid crisis, we find no evidence that narrow election of a Republican prosecutor affects overall drug or opioid overdose mortality among any demographic groups.

Some of this is what we might suspect; after all, Republican prosecutors probably are more aggressive about charging and convicting criminals, and locking up criminals would tend to reduce crime, even though the left might have you think that the best way to reduce crime is to get a bunch of social workers to speak soothingly. But the details are somewhat odd. When I first saw that “narrow election” of GOP prosecutors reduces firearm deaths, I wondered whether it held true just for murder or whether it also applied to suicides. I vaguely remembered learning long ago in some sociology class that suicides form the majority of gun deaths. It turn out that is still true:

[In 2023, for] the third straight year, gun suicides reached a new high: 27,300, or 58% of all gun deaths, were suicides. And more than half of all suicides in 2023 involved a gun. …

The report notes that suicides accounted for the majority of all firearm deaths every year since 1995.

What is a “narrow election”? I assume it’s a close election. Perhaps in places where GOP candidates win prosecutor elections by large margins, gun deaths are already lower.

But why would a GOP prosecutor’s “narrow election” make the number of suicides by gun be reduced? I don’t know. And why would the effect happen only among young white men? Is it just gun suicides that go own, or do all suicides go down? Well, the suicide rate in general is higher in white people than in black people. This is not a new phenomenon; it’s another thing I learned in college classes. Here are some recent staistics:

In 2023, men died by suicide 3.8 times more than women.

White males accounted for 68.13% of suicide deaths in 2023.

In 2023, firearms accounted for 55.36% of all suicide deaths. …

In 2023, among both males and females, Whites had the highest U.S. age-adjusted suicide rate (Male: 25.23 per 100,000; Female: 6.53 per 100,000). Suicide rates were much lower among Black or African Americans (Male: 14.59 per 100,000; Female: 3.44 per 100,000) and Asians (Male: 9.71 per 100,000; Female: 3.55 per 100,000).

When I was in college I did a big research report on suicide for a course I took, and I had to present the findings to the class and answer questions. So I had to know my statistics, and I recall that all these patterns were present back then: the sex, age, and race differentials. I’m surprised the trends have been so stable.