What Mookie said, Sense and Sensibility with Perspective. What "data are we looking for?" Well what data we are looking for is based off past experiences (and theory) and that informs our perspective of how we see reality for so much reality is coming at us we are thus both looking for X and not looking at everything else.

For example if I talk about total Gun deaths I am talking about the totality of everything. But people can be mad about smaller things inside the totality. Thus people, they, subdivide the totality into smaller categories to argue about.

And people will then argue about those smaller things, and people will not even agree on the definitions (of terms) and what is the most relevant thing to argue about. Is it suicides, is it domestic violence, is it murders of children in schools, etc.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/

We can not agree upon the same facts even if we share info for we are disagreeing about how we assemble those facts.

So yeah total deaths may be down, but mass shooting deaths are up. Likewise children's death due to guns is now higher than any other cause of children death (it used to be car accidents with gun deaths being flat in the 2000s to 2014 and in 2014 to now it has been slightly increase year over year since people bought more guns after 2014 with Fergusson and the Cell Phone Cameras / Protests / Riots of 2014)

https://www.axios.com/2022/05/26/gun-deaths-children-america

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So yeah what Mookie said.