Here is version 2 of the chart with more Countries.
Suicide is a very complex topic.
Here is what we know about historic suicide rates:
1) They go Way Down during shooting wars.
2) Only 3.3% of reported suicide attempts in the US are successful.
There is a 20 year rise in US suicide rates. Since 1999, our rate has risen from roughly 9.1:100K to 13.7:100K. Most of that growth (in my unqualified opinion) is likely driven by the factors mentioned by
CDFingers and senorgrand: economic decline and employment uncertainty. (The shrinking middle class)
According to the WHO, there are 92 Countries below the halfway mark by rank order. Of the 92 Countries below the half way point, here is the WHO list of Countries -Without- reporting problems:
Portugal, Spain, Singapore, United Kingdom, Italy, Israel, Greece
Basically, of the 92 Countries, 85 are consider to have significant under-reporting for three main reasons: (1) No way to track the numbers (Country too poor or too disorganized); (2) Religious prohibition of Suicide skews the numbers significantly; (3) Political Agenda (No one really thinks China's actual rate is 8:100K - down from 20+ only 25 years ago)
What that means is that it is likely that the United States is much closer to the arithmetic mean than it looks (even though the US is less than 1 std deviation above the mean).
No reasonable metrics based person would be able to 'find' evidence of a 'liberal gun law' effect in US suicides. It doesn't matter that many, many people in the US kill themselves with guns - our overall rate of suicides is not significantly high. As I said before, if there IS a Gun Law effect, then you should be able to see it between France and Switzerland (France=Restricted Gun Laws; Switzerland=Liberal). But what we do see is that Switzerland has a suicide rate exactly proportional to its French/German/Italian populations suicide rates and then matched back to those three Country's native rates.