And are cities within the US more like other cities within the US?

Cause... once again in said cities it doesn't correlate.

ManusJustus has a point I'm afraid Kasz. I mean, I've been to The west coast and the East coast of the states and the difference between cultures is as large as the difference between the East coast of the USA and Britain.

Anyway it doesn't matter.

I've tried to fix the thread, but I can't. I may need a mod

Except you can actually compare like states... and show the results still hold.

Or like cities if you'd be so inclined.

South Carlona and North Carolina are extremely similar... have widely different gun laws.... and North carolina owns  a lot more guns.

Yet their murder rates are nearly identical.

Also i would disagree that the cultures are far more different then the USA and Britain.

The cities with the biggest murder rates in the US?

Washington DC,

Detroit,

Cleveland

Etc.  There states have very varied gun owership numers.

Washington DC having the least of any city or state.  Since it was pretty much illegal till recently. 

Here is a very telling figure though.

If you subtract per captia murders by gun from per capita murders.

The US still has a higher murder rate then the UK...

and that's saying that nobody who was murdered with a gun would have been murdered anyway. A very unlikely situation to say the least.

In general survival rates for stab wounds are about 20% higher then gun wounds.

So... the US murder rate would still be WAY higher.

Nor does it take into account guns warding off crime. 

Which there is always Point Blank:Guns & Violence as a refrence... if you can't get ahold of journal articles.

Highwaystar's chart is absolute fail. I've seen that chart many times before, and I absolutely can't fathom why someone would tie gun ownership and firearm incedents. That's like trying to argue that countries with more cars aren't going to have more car wrecks - of course they are.

The real question is if gun ownership has an impact on overall crime rates. As Kasz has stated, the US has more crime in general than other developed nations - regardless of gun ownership (or the lack of it). What about areas in the US that have outright gun bans? Many places that have those still have rampant crime.

So I will bring out my chart. I compiled this concerning murders per capita in countries that have quantifiable statistics concerning gun ownership. I plotted both on the chart to look at trends. You'll notice I took an equal distribution of countries with high and low crime statistics:

Red indicates murders per capita, blue represents gun ownership per capita. As you can see, murders decrease, in general, where gun ownership either stays steady or increases slightly. 4 of the most murder-ridden countries in the world all have very low rates of gun ownership per capita (all under 15%). Compare this to countries with lower crime rates, and gun ownership tends to be slightly higher (20-25%) with a much reduced rate of murders per capita. The US is certainly an outlier concerning firearms and crime - it does not fit the pattern.

I've also done other analysis into the patterns of crime & various indicators. Truth be told, the most indicative thing concerning murders and violent crimes has to do with the GINI coefficent, which charts almost in paralell with murders per capita. That's what makes the US much different from Canda - we have a higher influx of poor people from other countries, and poverty on our own, which causes crime to soar in the US.

Hopefully this explains things. However, I have to say that your charts, Highwaystar, make absolutely no sense. The key metric to look at is if guns have an effect on crime. Not if the frequency of gun ownership affects crimes with guns, but if guns effect crime overall. Afterall, we want lower crime, not lower gun crime, since both are equally illegal. If you substitute gun crime from non-gun crime, it doesn't really change the picture, only the tools.

When you give guns to a violent society you are going to have more crime associated with guns.

Now, a non violent society that has working institutions doesnt have to have guns to protect themselves.

We have more poverty than the US and yet we have a less violent society, where you can almost always trust policemen and dont have to have guns to protect ourselves.

The argument Kasz used with culture just comes to proove that the US is more violent than other societies and maybe guns are needed with a society like that, but I dont think thats ideal.

I'll just chip in to say that I agree the main focus is what's causing crime and how to reduce it rather than seeing guns as causing crime.

There is another factor I believe which should be considered and that is mortality rate - i.e. if your assailant has a knife or bat instead of a gun does your survival chances get affected?

My view is that, in general, having guns around doesn't directly make you safer overall (statistically speaking)- although obviously it could in individual incidents. That's another factor, balancing overall odds vs individual events. So while some might quote having a gun saved them, that is only a single incident vs the overall picture where probably mortality rates would decrease overall without guns in the picture.

Since having guns around implies you are in a society with more widespread guns, I'd expect the chance of mortality to increase - i.e. it would be better if criminals were restricted to less lethal tools.

Removing guns from the equation though, while I suspect it would reduce fatality rates in crime (which is nonetheless an improvement) wouldn't likely have much impact on crime itself overall, as that is linked I believe to a host of other social and economic factors.

Homicide statistics, like violent crime statistics, are not specifically keyed to guns...so I'm not sure how you think the two are different enough in that regard to justify preferring homicides over violent crimes for analysis.  Granted I don't think either of them make strong arguments....but asserting that one makes a better argument than the other seems unsubstantiated.

They do make you safer if you know how to use them. Is the author of this article pro gun control?

As I said, if the OP is talking in the larger sense of overall probabilities, then they don't.  Individually they might make you safer, but they overall increase the probability of a fatal incident, hence technically they make you less safe.