>>According to stats, in NZ the number of guns is 40/100 people. In US, that number is about 110 guns/100 people.

They say lies, damned lies and statistics: what the NZ figure hides is that the number of handguns excluding police and military is maybe 0.0005 per 100 people.

In addition. firearm homicides in NZ is 1.07 per 10,000 population - but the habit of lumping in suicides hides that almost all of that is suicide. Measure non-suicide criminal homicide and it's 0.11 per 10,000.

Compared to the US rate of over 10 per 10,000 population- of which suicide is 6.3.

Hence the point I made elsewhere about excluding suicide to compare homicide and firearm frequencies... do that, and now the US has 2.5 times as many firearms per capita as NZ but almost 30 times the homicide rate. How can that be, if guns are the cause? Seems to me you need to be looking for other things. Handguns is an obvious candidate, as is the extent of police background checks and the legal obligation to keep firearms properly secured in a safe approved by your Arms Officer and separate from ammo.