In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, gun companies produced and imported more guns than ever before, and there were more gun deaths than ever before — more than 45,000. When we looked into the relationship between gun deaths and gun production in more detail, we found that the relationship between gun production — particularly handgun production — and suicides is stronger than gun deaths overall. David Hemenway, a Harvard researcher who has repeatedly found that easily accessible guns means more gun deaths, said household gun ownership levels might be more important than the size of the civilian gun stock.