Looking over the stats, I'm pretty sure it's over estimating the number of deaths per vehicle. The deaths per vehicle is the number of people in the car killed plus the number of other people killed in the collision. And that's a really good way to compare the safety record of one vehicle to another. But the way that is set up, if a Camry runs into a Lumina and the occupants of both cars die, then that's two deaths for the Camry
and two deaths for the Lumina. So cars are actually killing substantially less people compared to guns than those statistics would imply. Of the Camry's 71 deaths per million vehicles, 24 of them are deaths from vehicles and pedestrians that the vehicle struck - and some non-zero number of those are therefore being double counted. Since in the US, about
16% of collision fatalities are non-motorist, I would guess that 14 of those 71 deaths are double counted - appearing also in the death tallies of the car they ran into. That 71 deaths per million Camrys would be ~64 deaths per million if we counted it like gun deaths.
There is another thing that needs to be said, which is that cars are much more evenly distributed than guns. There are
90 guns for every 100 Americans, and there are
80 highway vehicles for every 100 Americans. But obviously there are people who own more than one car and people who own more than one gun. Apparently 61% of people in the US are licensed to drive a car, although obviously some non-zero number of those people don't actually have access to a car and are licensed for identification purposes. On the gun side: I find an upper estimate of 55 million gun owners in the US.
What that means is that like half the population is driving cars but like a sixth (17%) of the country is owning guns. So if you track it up by deaths per driver and deaths per gun owner, the numbers skew horrendously in favor of the cars. Those 64 Camry deaths per million cars shoots up to 102 deaths per million Camry
Owners, but the deaths for guns shoots up to 857 deaths per million gun owners. Now that's significantly lower than the death rate from, for example
Cancer (3219 per million inhabitants), but if we split cancer out into the multiple diseases that it actually is, the numbers change. If we go to the state with the highest rate of death from Lung and Bronchus Cancer (Kentucky), the death rate is 746 per year per million inhabitants.
So... gun owners are more deadly than lung cancer. By a substantial margin, even if you live in a place where everyone smokes (note the state with the lowest death rate from lung cancer is California at 220 per million per year). Individual firearms are not, but if you count collections of guns instead of individual guns, they are more deadly than lung cancer.
-Username17