Edit: seems to be the latter

https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2020/october...

If you compare to Canada which, compared to all Western countries besides the US, has comparatively lax gun laws and high firearms ownership rates and a similar overall culture:

  * US sees 12.21 firearms deaths per capita per year to Canada's 1.94.
  * US sees 4.46 homicides via firearm per capita per year to Canada's 0.52.

This pattern holds over basically all numbers relating to rates of violence at every level of division.

According to these statistics USA has only almost 4 times as many guns as Canada, suggesting that to a large extent "people kill people".

Also, the type of firearms owned are different. In Canada, firearms are mostly for hunting whereas in the United States, they are mostly for protection.

In Canada, less than 12% of firearm-owning households have hand guns whereas it is at 72% in the U.S. In Canada, 95% of firearm-owning households own long guns. Long guns are more inconvenient for committing crimes or murders than handguns.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/america...

https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/jsp-sjp/wd98_4-d...

regardless when will y'all understand citing death statistics will not convince us to ban guns? we oppose it because we believe it's wrong to restrict a basic freedom not because death figures are under some magic threshold where we'd support it if the number went over.

By this metric, the US is better off that much of South and Central America. I bet if the stats were normalized by deaths/100K guns instead the US would look pretty good. (~17% drop for US, as we have more guns than people, but every other country has significant increases)