I'm not ascribing it to racial diversity. I'll elaborate a bit on exactly what I mean--I'm ascribing it to a particular cultural mix that is in part uniquely derived from the New World's history with slavery.

>n the US this poor are black, while in other countries the social segregation goes around different lines (e.g. gipsies in eastern europe).

That's not comparable, Gypsies do not make up anywhere near the percent of the population in Europe that black americans do in the US (also according to wikipedia we have have more Gypsies in the US than the vast majority of European countries).

>is actually the same as saying "poor/uneducated/mistreated people are responsible for most killing"

That's not correct. If it were that simple, once you adjusted for education and income, you would expect to find similar crime rates between blacks and whites, and nearly identical crime rates between blacks and other minorities. But that isn't the case, a poor uneducated black person is still many times more likely to commit a crime than any other poor uneducated race/ethnicity in the US.

Yes there have been plenty of cases of discrimination against minorities and increased criminality amongst minorities, but there are two factors here which seem to be fairly unique.

1. Descended from slaves. There is no other first world country where 13% of it's population is recently descended from slaves, forcibly moved there. In fact if you'll look at every other country in world that does have a large percentage of slave descendants, you'll find an incredibly high crime rate.

If you look at the top 20 countries by intentional homicide rate[0], you'll note that all but South Africa are in the New World, and have some recent(last 200 years) history of slavery.

2. No other first world country has had such a large single monolithic underclass for nearly its entire history. Underclasses come and go as immigrants assimilate. That hasn't been the case in the us with this one particular group.

In the end what I'm arguing is that you can't compare the U.S. to Europe, there are just too many differences to take into account. Take 2 separate groups in the US--blacks and whites--adjust for income--and you'll find that whites, even poor uneducated ones, have a similar homicide rate to other first world countries. Therefore gun ownership/access is not what causes our high homicide rate.

I would argue that if you banned guns tomorrow, and every law abiding citizen in the US decided to march down to the police station and turn in his gun, we would still have a murder rate much higher than nearly every country in Europe.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona... Note that the top 20 countries have far higher murder rates than the next 20