By: IJEOMA OPARA
Preliminary data from the Maryland Department of Health shows that suicides involving firearms in Maryland overtook gun homicides in 2025.
On Wednesday, April 2, 2025, Montgomery County Department of Police dispatched officials to a building in Chevy Chase, where a married couple lay dead with gunshot wounds.
The police published a news release five days later, saying officials found a gun and ammunition nearby, and the bodies had been transported to the chief medical examiner in Baltimore for autopsy. “The manner of death for Kate Simoni Fralin was determined to be a homicide,” the police noted in the release. “While the official cause and manner of death for William Scott Fralin are pending, his death is being investigated as a suicide.”
Shiera Goff, director of public information for the police department, told Capital News Service in April that the case is now closed and was ruled as a murder-suicide.
Like the Fralins, nearly 5,400 people in Maryland lost their lives to homicides and suicides involving firearms between 2018 and 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Firearm suicides and homicides in the state spiked during COVID and stayed high throughout 2021. In 2022, the figures started to drop. But while homicides continued to decline, suicides resumed the climb in 2024.
Preliminary data from Maryland’s Department of Health shows that firearm suicides overtook homicides in 2025. The trend, however, is not driven by a significant increase in suicides involving firearms in Maryland, but a steady decline in homicides. It also reflects a nationwide pattern, where firearm homicides have fallen multiple years in a row. Experts do not have a single explanation for the nationwide decline in homicides.
“That’s a puzzle that many people have been trying to understand,” Daniel Webster, distinguished scholar for the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, told Capital News Service.
He said efforts to curb firearm violence may now be yielding results, and compared gun control, like its spread, to infectious diseases. “It is, in some ways, a social contagion,” Webster said. “When shootings start to rise in a given area, there’s a variety of things that happen that tend to lead to more shootings.”
Retaliation and increased purchase of firearms due to fear, are some of the factors that increase the rate of gun violence once they begin to take place.According to Webster, this process occurs in reverse once violence reduction efforts begin to kick in, and may be a factor suppressing the number of firearm homicides nationwide.“You prevent a shooting in a particular neighborhood today, you actually prevented more, because there would have been more retaliation and other sort of processes going on,” he said.
Baltimore County, Prince George’s County, Anne Arundel County, Baltimore City and Montgomery County had the top five counts of combined firearm-related homicides and suicides in Maryland between 2018 and 2024, according to a Capital News Service analysis of CDC data.
Baltimore City, Prince George’s County and Baltimore County also had the highest firearm homicide rates per 100,000 people.
Firearm suicide rates were highest in rural jurisdictions where populations are typically smaller, with Garrett County topping the list at almost 13 per 100,000, even though counts were far lower than urban areas.
The CDC suppressed figures for counties where the number of deaths were fewer than 10.
Webster said social isolation and less access to mental health care may combine with more access to firearms in rural areas to drive up suicide rates.
While most rural counties in Maryland ranked low in homicide rates, Dorchester County had the same rate as Baltimore County– almost 8 homicide deaths per 100,000– and shared third place. It also had the second highest rate of total suicides between 2018 and 2024.Maryland legislators have taken steps to combat gun violence in the state, including passing strict firearm legislation and establishing intervention programs, but Webster said no gun laws are 100% effective, as Second Amendment rights guarantee access to firearms.
He also said the laws work better for homicides, as conditions that make it unlawful to acquire firearms are not well suited to the suicide problem.
He also stressed the need for safe firearm storage practices, especially to reduce teen suicides.
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