https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Along the same lines of reasoning as yours, approximately 1/2 our murders are committed by black Americans, and the proportion of people who are black are well correlated with murders. So one could equally well say that the murder rate is high because of the presence of black people. Would you endorse this conclusion? If not, why not?
(Let me emphasize I'm not endorsing the conclusion I derive here - I simply plan to repeat whatever argument jaquesm has against the above conclusion back at him w.r.t. guns.)
IF this was true, we would see a correlation between gun ownership (or access) and murder rates. If anything, the correlation is slightly negative, both in the US and globally.
Where you DO see the correlation is inequality. In US states, using data from wikipedia, I find a 70% correlation between gini coefficients and homicide rates. The same is true globally.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and...
There is a correlation, albeit a negative one:
http://www.theacru.org/harvard_study_gun_control_is_counterp...
The study, which just appeared in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694), set out to answer the question in its title: “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence.”
The findings of two criminologists – Prof. Don Kates and Prof. Gary Mauser – in their exhaustive study of American and European gun laws and violence rates, are telling:
Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population).
For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland’s murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns.
Without knowing exactly what they considered homicide and what they considered a firearm related homicide, these numbers are meaningless. Only a few years ago the CDC released a large study where they choose to define a female forcing a male to penetrate as not being rape, thus resulting in very different statistics about rape than had the definitions been the more common 'non-consensual sex' or such.
In the last 20 years they have stopped giving ammunition to keep with your military rifle, exactly because they started having problems with shootings. Switzerland is the worst possible "example" of gun ownership reducing violent crime.
