RTH,

What people fail to consider is that "all violence is local."  Point of fact:  during the height of the bad old days of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland, those who lived in the more affluent and better educated parts of the country experienced little of the violence that was the bane of poorer neighborhoods where obvious class differences existed between the "haves" and the "have nots."  Likewise, we see this in our own country today.  It's not without cause that places like south Chicago or west Baltimore have the reputations they do.  Sometimes there are drastic differences in violent crime and murder rates just comparing one residential city block to another - all in the same city.  If just the sheer availability of guns made for an inevitable statistical outcome, this would not be so.  But it is.