[anoonmoose]

I'm reading this pretty differently from you, I think. In my view, it looks like until 2013, car deaths were dropping dramatically, and have mostly been bouncing around a steady state since. Whereas deaths were dropping slightly until 2013, and have increased significantly in the years since that. The 2020 car deaths value is close to the 2013-2020 average, but the 2020 (and 2019, and 2018, and 2017) gun deaths are higher than the 2013-2020 average.

[throwaway894345]

Yeah, my claim was simplistic, but the overall idea holds: in both cases there was a marked downward trend until an inflection point in 2013. For gun deaths, that inflection point was a reversal of the downward trend, and for traffic deaths it was an increase followed by a decrease, followed by an increase, but on average since 2013 it's probably pretty level. In whichever case, my point was that it doesn't make sense to characterize traffic deaths as a "long term downward trend" nor to characterize gun deaths as "a long term upward trend".