Youth suicide rates are higher in states where household gun ownership is more common, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

In the 10 states with the highest youth suicide rates, the average household gun ownership rate was more than 50 percent, according to the study. In the 10 states with the lowest suicide rates, it was 20 percent. That includes New Jersey, which had the lowest youth suicide rate in the nation.

“The availability of firearms is contributing to an increase in the actual number of suicides,” said predoctoral fellow Anita Knopov, the study’s lead author, “not just leading youth to substitute other means of suicide for guns.”

Suicides have been rising across all age groups, but notably among young people, for whom suicide is the second-leading cause of death, behind unintentional injury. Every day, an average of three people between ages 10 and 19 die by firearm-related suicide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. The year 2016 saw 1,102 youth suicides by guns across the United States.

The study, reported in Preventive Medicine, said New Jersey had the second-lowest rate of household gun ownership of any state and a youth suicide rate of 2.6 per 100,000 people. By contrast, in the states with the four highest suicide rates — between 11 and 15 per 100,000 in Alaska, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana — 60 percent to 65 percent of households own guns, researchers from the Boston University School of Public Health found.

Pennsylvania was tied with New Hampshire for the 10th-lowest suicide rate, 4.2 per 100,000, and has a middling proportion of gun ownership at 35 percent. Wyoming had the highest household gun ownership at 65.5 percent; Hawaii the lowest at 10.2 percent.

“This study demonstrates that the strongest single predictor of a state’s youth suicide rate is the prevalence of household gun ownership in that state,” said co-author Michael Siegel, a Boston University professor.