JOSEPH A. GARCIA/THE STAR Eric Sonstegard, assistant chief of police, looks over boxed guns in the Oxnard Police Department's property room that were collected as evidence.

SHARE JOSEPH A. GARCIA/THE STAR The muzzle of a rifle extends from a set of boxed guns in the Oxnard Police Department's property room that were collected as evidence. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO/ VENTURA COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE Guns used by the Ventura County Sheriff's Office crime lab for comparison in firearms testing.

By Cheri Carlson and Cindy Von Quednow of the Ventura County Star

Nearly 900 people died from gunfire in Ventura County over the past 16 years.

But most of their deaths never made headlines.

They died in the home down the street, in a car or a backyard. Most died alone.

Two-thirds of the 895 men, women and children who died from gunshot wounds in the county from 2000 through 2015 killed themselves — a statistic mirrored nationwide.

"There are a lot of myths or misunderstandings about gun violence. One of them is that it's primarily a crime problem," said Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis. "If we're looking at fatalities, it's primarily a self-inflicted problem."

Nationwide, 90 people each day die from gunshot wounds.

In 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 21,175 people killed themselves using a gun. That was close to two-thirds, or 63 percent, of all gun deaths. One-third of the fatal shootings — or 11,208 — were homicides.

"Suicides account for the majority of gun deaths. That's been true, with the exception of maybe one or two years, for nearly a century," said Wintemute, also a professor and emergency room doctor. "Even in the late '80s and early '90s, when gun homicide rates were higher than they have been since the gangster days of the '30s, suicides were still more common."

The Star obtained and analyzed records on gun deaths from the Ventura County Medical Examiner's Office and other agencies, finding that in nearly every city in the county, suicides by gun far outnumber homicides and accidents.

Of the 895 gun deaths from 2000 through 2015, officials ruled 580 as suicides and 309 — about a third — as homicides. Six others died in accidental shootings.

Gun deaths spanned from Ojai to Simi Valley, Fillmore to Port Hueneme. Most of those killed were men; about 13 percent were women. Dozens were children under 18

Tap/click the map below to view gun deaths in Ventura County by ZIP code.

'Shock to see that'

The numbers did not surprise Ventura Police Cmdr. Tom Higgins.

"That figure seems to be consistent with what I've seen," he said.

The first call he ever responded to as an officer-in-training was a fatal shooting in December 1994. A woman had used a shotgun to kill herself.

"It was a shock to see that," said Higgins, who was one of the first officers at the scene.

He said that law enforcement officials' role in responding to people in crisis is more reactive.

"Unfortunately, when we deal with people in crisis, most of the time it's after the fact," Higgins said.

Tracking ownership, registration and origin is standard in any gun death investigation, Higgins said. But local law enforcement agencies said they don't track data on guns used in fatal shootings.

Instead, that information is kept in each individual case file, making it difficult to show whether the guns generally are legally owned or not.

Most Ventura County agencies agreed to provide The Star with information about the guns used in one year of shooting fatalities. The data from 2014 showed no weapon was recovered in 13 of the 49 gun deaths.

In seven other deaths, the gun was legally owned by the person responsible for the shooting, and one was owned by an acquaintance of the responsible party, the agencies reported.

In a suicide, one gun had been rented at a shooting range, and another death was caused by a nail gun.

There were 26 other gun deaths in 2014 that fell under the jurisdiction of the Ventura County Sheriff's Office, according to records from the medical examiner's office and The Star's homicide database.

The sheriff's office, however, declined to provide data about the guns used in those deaths, saying it would be too time consuming and difficult to look up the information case by case.

Click below to read a survivor's story



A preventable death

Suicide was the 10th leading cause of death in the nation in 2014, the latest data available from public health officials.

In Ventura County, suicide was the eighth leading cause of death in 2013 and consistently falls in the top 10.

Gun suicides generally outnumber all other means — much more than half among men and less than half among women.

Among interventions, experts say temporarily taking away a person's means to hurt themselves can help prevent suicide.

"We know that if we can defer people ... take away their ability to kill themselves for a while, very often they get past the mental state that led them to that," Levin said.

People think that if someone wants to die by suicide nothing can be done to stop them. That's often completely wrong, said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.

Generally, a person who attempts suicide is just going through a bad period. If someone can help them through that, they will be OK, he said.

"They wake up in the morning, and they're in pain and they can't see any hope," Hemenway said. "They take whatever is available, and if a gun is available, they will die."

On average, firearms account for around 50 percent of all suicides "because guns are so lethal," Hemenway said.

If people start jumping off the Empire State Building, you put up suicide prevention barriers, Hemenway said. When some inmates first go to jail, they are put on suicide watch.

Similarly, suicide prevention plans need to include removing any guns from the house for a while, he said.

Continue reading the story below

Oxnard, Santa Paula outliers

Oxnard and Santa Paula were the only areas in the county where homicides outnumbered other gun deaths.

The Star obtained more detailed records from the county medical examiner's office for hundreds of gun suicides and accidents from January 2000 through June 2015.

Those records and The Star's homicide database allowed a deeper look at the gun deaths, including the city where the death occurred, the age and the gender of the person who died.

An analysis showed close to half of the county's homicides happened in Oxnard, the biggest city.

Meanwhile, the Oxnard area also had one of the lowest rates of suicide. That's common for a more urban area, Hemenway said.

Cities have more homicides generally because there is more crime and more gangs, he said. But they also tend to have lower rates of household gun ownership on average.

"They are less likely to own a gun in a house," he said. "So they are less likely, when they attempt suicide, to die."

That's compared to more rural areas, which have less street crime but more people who own guns for recreational uses such as hunting or target shooting.

'doesn't really involve me'

Mass shootings over the past decade in the United States have prompted calls for gun law reforms.

They could happen anywhere anytime and have led the public to start feeling a stake in firearm violence, Wintemute said. But mass shootings account for less than 1 percent of all gun deaths.

In five of the deadliest mass shootings over the past decade, 97 people were killed. The number of people who die in a shooting each day in the U.S. — 90, on average — comes just shy of that total.

For a long time, the tendency has been to divide firearm violence into various parts: the crime problem. The mental health problem. The safety problem, Wintemute said.

That makes it harder to see the magnitude of the whole problem, he said. And, that also makes it possible for the public to believe wrongly that they don't have a stake in the problem.

"For homicide and suicide, there's a story — two people having a beef, or somebody is depressed — it's a story that the average person can tell and leave themselves out of it," Wintemute said.

That's why Wintemute talks a lot about gun suicides. "Because the group at highest risk is middle-aged and older white men, and that's the group that many policymakers come from."