Headlines over “gun deaths” will always draw eyes. Some people will immediately click the link, then share it all over social media, just so they can say, “See! I told you guns are bad!”

There are usually problems with this, though.

For example, these reports rarely provide any context and they also tend to involve a fair bit of sensationalism in presenting all firearm-related fatalities as the same.

Like this one does.

As of Aug. 1, at least 25,198 people have died from gun violence in the U.S. this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive – which is an average of roughly 118 deaths each day.

Of those who died, 879 were teens and 170 were children.

Deaths by suicide have made up the vast majority of gun violence deaths this year. There’s been more than 14,000 deaths by gun suicide this year, an average of about 66 deaths by suicide per day in 2023.

The majority of these deaths have occurred in Texas, California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois and Louisiana.

The grim tally of gun violence deaths includes 488 people killed in police officer-involved shootings. Thirty-four police officers have been fatally shot in the line of duty this year.

So about 56 percent of those deaths were suicides and nearly 500 were killed in officer-involved shootings, meaning they were justified homicides.

Now, this is going to be used to push gun control. It’s going to be used to justify more and more restrictions on our basic civil liberties, and they dishonest hacks won’t even pretend there’s a difference in these categories of shootings.

Suicides are awful and tragic, as are homicides, but the two things are very different.

The solutions to suicides aren’t the same as those for homicides. The motivations are completely different, so addressing the underlying causes is going to be completely different.

Gun control doesn’t stop suicides. At best, it shifts people to use another method, but it doesn’t stop suicides.

Granted, it doesn’t stop homicides, either.

Yet anti-gun voices in the media love to lump all gun deaths into one big bucket. They want as big of a number as possible to scare people with. You can’t do that with just the homicide numbers.

So, suicides it is.

Yes, these are all “gun deaths” if you just want the total of people who were killed due to a gunshot. For many people, though, that’s all that matters.

And it’s telling, because most of these people claim they don’t want to ban gun ownership, but then can’t differentiate between criminals’ acts and someone who took their own life due to their own mental illness.

They want them lumped because the evil, at least in their minds, is the guns themselves.

If it was really about saving people’s lives, they’d focus on the underlying conditions at play here. Everything from mental health treatment to job programs would be on the agenda.

The fact that they’re not is telling.

It’s just not telling us anything we didn’t already know after decades of watching and listening to the anti-gun agenda.