MAIL BAG: Eugene Volokh responded to yesterday’s item about suicide and veterans.

Veterans have double the suicide rate of Americans generally only if you don’t control for sex and age — which isn’t that helpful, since both veterans and suicides generally are overwhelmingly male. Controlling for sex and age, there is still an elevated rate for veterans, but not by that much: “After adjusting for differences in age and gender, risk for suicide was 21 percent higher among Veterans when compared with U.S. civilian adults.”

Interestingly, the risk was 18% higher for male veterans, but 2.4 times that of civilians for female veterans — I have no idea why this would be so.

Me, either — but it certainly bears looking into.