Thanks for the data. Interesting list. The US is still such an outlier with so many more guns per capita, almost twice as many as the next top ten.
Looking into this a little more before getting ready to hit the shower and get started reviewing for my criminology final today, I found the Global Peace Index.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Peace_IndexIf you sort the list by peacefulness and look at the ten most peaceful, you will find that only one of those ten countries (Japan) has highly restrictive gun laws. The other countries' gun laws are mostly pretty permissive, with almost all of them falling in the top twenty of per capita gun ownership rate. Iceland, in particular, which I've mentioned before, has somewhere around the 15th highest per capita gun ownership rate in the world, and it has consistently sat at number one on the GPI for the past several years. Colombia, with its relatively low gun ownership rate, is at number 147. Then, of course, there's the United States, which as we all know has the world's highest per capita gun ownership rate and checks in at number 100 on the GPI. Yemen doesn't have a very proud showing, either.
All of which means that the relationship between gun ownership and violence in society is significantly more complicated than most people think. Criminology in general is more complicated than most people think, as just one criminology course has already taught me -- my term paper, in fact, is on the insanely high homicide rate in Puerto Rico, and of all the research that I've done in various journals and newspapers and so on about how to address the problem, nobody is talking about gun laws. They're talking about a hell of a lot of other things, though; there are various theories of homicide, and there is widespread disagreement among them.
And I need to get back to my own work on the subject. Leaving now. (Semester is over tomorrow night. Looking forward to having this done with. Bleah.)