Is this a valid gun death statistic? [View all]

[mvccd1000]

I'm honestly interested in opinions from both gun-control advocates and gun-rights supporters. When we read statistics of gun deaths and gun violence in the US, how should we count deaths like these?

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2012/05/04/20120504prescott-elderly-man-kills-wife-self.html

PRESCOTT -- Police in Prescott say an 88-year-old man killed his wife and them himself after calling 911 and saying both were terminally ill and planned to commit suicide.

Police spokesman Lt. Andy Reinhardt says the man called police at about 8 p.m. Thursday from a medical center parking lot and told dispatchers where they could be found. Arriving officers discovered the man dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and his wife severely wounded. She was flown to a Phoenix hospital where she died.

Reinhardt says the couple lived in a nearby assisted living facility and had apparently walked to the medical center where they were found.

The couple were identified as Robert Grossman and his 85-year-old wife Joanne Grossman.

Obviously this couple had thought out and planned their actions, and at 85 and 88 years old had probably decided that there was not much they still wanted to see and do in life. I would guess that, with this much planning involved, the odds are very good that they would have found another way to accomplish their goals if a gun were not available.

1) Do you feel they should have been dissuaded from their choice?
2) Assuming they were going to do it, is it fair to label this "gun violence?" (They could have chosen pills or a car's exhaust to accomplish the same thing.)
3) (Not really on topic, but...) Do you support people's right to end their lives when they see fit?

1 and 3 go together for me. Having witnessed a formerly vital and active grandmother reduced overnight to a stroke victim who could not feed or bathe herself, and having had her beg me in tears to kill her every time I saw her for the next two years, I completely support the rights of people in the late stages of life to make their own decisions to end it. If you're already in horrible pain and suffering, and the only direction you will go is downhill until you die, why should you be forced to wait for it?

With those facts in mind, and assuming you live in the 99% of the world that does not allow you to make your own decisions about the end of your life, is it valid to call this "gun violence" and use it as a call to restrict the availability of handguns?