Maybe you missed the irony that - it took a Gun-Thing\ufffd er "issue" even to get *raised* (for whatever is the attention span of a gnat?)
Without a referent, numbers are meaningless.
So the issue was when someone said "guns are THE problem!".... but when you look into the issue, and put it into CONTEXT... It turns out that perhaps there are more dangerous issues, inside the speaker's own house, as it turns out.
And the issue would have come up, with pretty much any group/company he'd gone after - with the contextual numbers.
Addison