Homicide is the intentional killing of another person, so accidents and suicides would not be included in that number from the article. If you include accidents and suicides the total number is usually 30-40k/year (varies every year) most of that is suicides.
I don’t have a source handy right now, but I seem to recall that somewhere around ~1000 homicides per year are “justifiable homicide” (not murder) which most of that is done by the police. I could be wrong on that number, give or take, but I think it’s in the ballpark.
So the numbers in that chart are pretty indicative of violent crimes as about 12-13k of the almost 14k reported will be “murder” instead of a justifiable homicide. Murder definitely counts as violent crime.
There’s no defense really against the gun-ban league. But we can point out when they don’t make sense (which is often).
The primary target of gun-banners is “assault weapons” and more specifically AR-15 and similar weapons (basically all semi-auto rifles). I’m sure they’ll eventually get around to all the guns, but right now they feel like assault weapons are the easy button.
From the way the gun-ban league positions their ads, articles, videos, etc… you’d think ALL gun deaths (the 40k number) were the result of an assault weapon. But the reality (according to FBI stats) is that what anti-gunners call “assault weapons” are only responsible for a tiny fraction of gun deaths every year. Approximately twice as many people are beaten to death (hands and feet), four or five times as many are bludgeoned to death, another four or five times are stabbed to death, all more than assault weapons. But no one talks (yet) about banning hammers, knives, and feet even though they kill more people than assault weapons.