Over 70% of those who survive a suicide attempt don't try again, said Anestis.
CBS News: How do guns fit into the story of American suicide?
Michael Anestis: You can't really talk about American suicide without talking about firearms. More than half of all the suicide deaths in America are self-inflicted gunshot wounds. There's a pretty clear relationship between firearm access and suicide death. So whether you're the firearm owner yourself or anybody who lives in the home [where] there's a firearm present, their risk for death by suicide goes up three to five times.
And it's not that the firearm makes them vulnerable to thinking about suicide. It's just that if someone is thinking about suicide and they have quick and ready access to the most lethal method, then they're at greater risk of dying. If you take all the other suicide attempts together in the United States to combine them, less than 5% of those attempts to result in death. There's nothing that compares to firearms in terms of how deadly they are in a suicide attempt.