Further, the data is misleading as well. Suicides, homicides, and accidental deaths are three different things.
On top of that, this data is collected across the US...meaning that it includes both areas where gun laws are loose, and areas where gun laws are strict. This means that the data tells us nothing about whether tougher laws would help or hurt the state of gun-related death, for reasons that should be obvious to anybody who's completed a high school science class.
In terms of someone being killed by a gun, how so exactly?
You haven't made any arguments in support of this claim.
> Further, the data is misleading as well. Suicides, homicides, and accidental deaths are three different things.
Yes, what is your point?
> This means that the data tells us nothing about whether tougher laws would help or hurt the state of gun-related death
Rates of gun ownership is tightly-correlated with rates of gun-related deaths, at whatever scale you cut it. This also holds true for gun suicides:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/spr08gunprevalence...
Suicides, homicides, and accidents all have different motives and circumstances. Further, suicides and homicides are often driven by mental illness, while accidemts are driven by not following precautions. They require different strategies to fix each problem, because they are three different problems.
Correlation between the existence of firearms and the presence of fireaems deaths is actually kind of obvious people cannot die of something that has not been invented yet. The real question is causality: Why do people get shot and killed? This is why the data in this article is useless--there is no control group. It does not show whether gun deaths are more frequent where firearms are legal, or more common where they have been outlawed. It merely shows that they exist.
Show me data that indicates--beyond a shadow of a doubt--that states with looser gun laws have more firearms homicides than states with stricter gun laws. Then you will have won.
> yet there is zero reason to conflate that with homicides involving a firearm.
The article doesn't conflate anything; it makes a very interesting and important comparison: vehicle deaths (which have been extensively studied for decades, with much federal regulation and other pressure to improve safety) are now on par with gun deaths (which had been banned from federal research for nearly two decades).
> It's amazing that we've improved vehicle safety in the last 60 years
Wouldn't it be nice if fewer people were dying from guns as well?