Why would suicides using guns be considered "puffing" the numbers in favor of the anti stance?
They used a gun to kill themselves, right?
This gets to a bigger picture question. To figure out how statistics might be relevant or not relevant you have to ask and answer clearly, WHAT are you trying to find out with these statistics? Or more usually, what point are you trying to prove to people by quoting this statistic?
The promise of gun control is safer society. Really, that's the only (publicly stated) purpose of gun control laws. Do something to make "us all" safer. That implies violence enacted
against us. Violence enacted against us
by someone else, against our will.
Suicide is a completely tangential matter to gun control and it muddies the issue drastically. If a politician comes out raging on his speachifyin' stump that he's going to pass laws to take away people's ability (via tools) to end THEIR OWN lives --- well, he's going to have a few eager fans (mostly from the extreme social conservative wing, ironically), but most folks are going to be looking with an eyebrow raised, and trying to figure out if that's something they're really ready to swallow.
I mean, is it not any person's ultimate (and perhaps greatest single!) right to decide if they do not wish to live any further? How incredibly oppressive and restrictive and downright tyrannical is it for a political leader to tell someone, "you don't have the RIGHT to stop living, and I'm going to take away your means to do so?"
All that to say, then, lumping suicide-by-gun numbers into the statistical pool used to show what a threat of violence we citizens live under is inapt, at best, and I'd say is disingenuous. Anti-gun politicians and promoters do it, and I believe do it knowingly, because it DRAMATICALLY increases the apparent weight of the problem they're trying to get folks to let them "solve." NO, they will not come right out and say, "
I'm for taking away your ability to kill yourself if you decide to no longer live." But they will throw into their speeches the lump sum numbers of firearms deaths as though ALL of them represent external violent threats to the "good folks at home."
If you want to say, "But I'm just looking at deaths in which a gun was used, period, absent any deeper meaning or purpose," ok, that's fine. But that's very rarely why anyone is looking at these things. What would be the use of that information, then, if you're going to limit this to deaths involving firearms? Might as well look at ALL deaths, if you aren't trying to influence or find significance in the discrete factor of which tool was used.