Other industrialized nations don’t generally lump gun suicide in with gun homicide when discussing “gun deaths” at all. The choice to do that here was literally done to inflate the numbers as compared to other countries. It was not a statistical choice, it was a rhetorical one, leaning on the psychological failures of the common man to ignore counterfactuals. The overall suicide rate in South Korea, for instance, exceeds the combined homicide and suicide rates in the United States, by all methods. That’s just one of many examples why these “other countries comparisons” are dishonest. We should be celebrating the fact that our homicide rates for the last decade are at historical lows for us.

The Gun Homicide Epidemic Isn’t