Sigh,

How did this even get into “Toward Data Science”? I see your PhD isn’t in statistics, maybe it should have been.

This is a giant causation-correlation fallacy. You didn’t control for anything at all. Not poverty rates, not education levels, not economic mobility. You conflated suicide with gun based homicide. You did this because you had already assumed gun laws were the solution to the violence and suicide problems.

Perhaps more people buy guns when they are stuck in bad areas? When they feel victimized? Perhaps guns are purchased or owned by those who wish to kill themselves because it is effective? But your entire article assumes that the ownership of a gun causes the deaths as opposed to it being a symptom of the economic and cultural environment.

This graph provides abolutely no insight at all.

“I did not spend much time on this plot.”
Or on the data science for the article. You made a graph.