Deltoid

Rick Bressler said:

The Netherlands have a homicide rate about double that of the English one, and only half as many guns.... So here we have The Netherlands at about the lowest rate of gun ownership in Europe, and the Swiss with one of the highest and the homicide rates are about equal.

We really need to look at more data points....

I found ownership percentages for handguns in "Experiences of Crime across the World" van Dijk, Mayhew and Killias (1991). These are from an international victimization survey. (The survey asked about long guns too, but the book does not report the answer.) I took the ownership percentages for long guns from email from jgreely, who got them from an article by Don Kates. I computed homicide rates from the World Health Organization Statistical Yearbook, taking averages for 82-88 (except that values for Belgium 85,87,88, Spain 87,88, USA 85 and NI 82 were missing). Result is this table:

         Country  hom  hand   all
                  rate gun%  gun%
             USA  8.8    29  48.9
Northern Ireland  5.2   1.5
         Finland  2.9     7  25.5
          Canada  2.1     4  30.8
       Australia  2.0     2  20.1
        Scotland  1.8   0.5
         Belgium  1.8     6  16.8
     Switzerland  1.2    14  32.6
          Norway  1.2   3.5  31.2
          France  1.2   5.5  24.7
    West Germany  1.2   6.5   9.2
           Spain  1.0     2
     Netherlands  0.9     1   2.0
 England & Wales  0.7   0.5   4.7

(52% of the Swiss handguns were identified as army guns.)

There do seem to be moderate positive correlations between the homicide rate, and gun ownership percentages.

For all guns the correlation coefficient was 0.71. Excluding the US gives a correlation coefficient of 0.48.

For hand guns the correlation coefficient was 0.70. Excluding the US, Switzerland, and NI (outliers) gives a correlation coefficient of 0.45.

(And of course, we know that correlation is not the same as causation.)