Verily and Amen. The overwhelming majority of gun shooting deaths are with handguns.

And that bears separation, as you clearly said, between 1) suicide deaths (which are 66% of gun deaths) and 2) gun assaults, where 80% or more are with handguns, and only a fraction of the remaining 20% are with assault rifles. I wonder how many are accidental shootings, where someone handling a weapon either shoots themselves or someone else. I personally know of two such incidents.

One was a retired police officer in mid 40's I knew, a big bodybuilder guy who was well into his second career as a personal trainer, and even he, with his lifetime of training, accidentally fired a bullet through his left thigh while holstering his gun. No permanent damage, it was healing when I met him, but I'm sure it hurt like hell.

The second was the upstairs neighbor of my brother's apartment in Deerfield Beach. A few 18-20 year olds, and one of them was showing off a new gun to his friends, and accidentally fired a bullet, killing his friend.

My point just being, I don't know if that's a category of shooting that is statistically tracked, or if it is just swept into the categories of "suicide" or "shootings".
My point also being that accidental shootings resulting in suicide or homicide are not ones that would warrant restrictions based on mental illness or crime, they are simply accidents.

But the gun-control Nazis could manipulate those statistics to inflate statistics that support their position of gun control. It annoys me that they manipulate the suicide statistics, ambiguously grouping them with gun crimes to inflate the numbers, just calling them "gun deaths". But that masks that the overwhelming number of "gun deaths" by that statistic are self-inflicted and not gun crimes or homicides.

I'm also concerned that if they tighten laws on mental health preventing gun ownership, that these can be manipulated to keep responsible people from owning guns. If a wife or neighbor wants to hurt a mentally healthy guy, they could maliciously report him as looking crazy or unstable and have his guns taken away.

Or even more scary, if someone in state or federal government like a James Comey or a Lois Lerner or Peter Strzok or Lisa Page wanted to take guns away from a political group they don't like, they could also manipulate the system to sweepingly categorize them as dangerous and take away their guns.

It would be nice if political leaders would refrain from virtual non-issues like assault weapon bans, and instead make a real effort to stop gun crime in places we know it is statistically prevalent year after year, such as Chicago, Baltimore, Washington DC, Philadelphia/Camden, or close to me, Miami.
You're right that this is just a show for the TV cameras, and even if they pass an assault weapons ban, that is a diversion from the real issue, which is handgun crimes and violence in the inner cities.

If only.