This is a bit of a hobby interest of mine. While it's possible that your statement is true, I think it misses the point. Gun murders in the U.S. are a very low

This is a bit of a hobby interest of mine. While it's possible that your statement is true, I think it misses the point. Gun murders in the U.S. are a very low percentage of deaths (0.39%) and preventable deaths (~1.1%, there's some disagreement about what's "preventable"). This excludes suicides. You may wish to include them if that makes sense given your interests. People love to focus on relative comparisons (e.g., Scotland vs. US), but miss the forest for the trees. Some tiny proportion being 5x some other country's tiny proportion is irrelevent. If your goal is to prevent untimely, unwanted deaths there are oh so many other ways to apply your resources that will yield orders of magnitude more improvement per dollar / per minute. People like to pay attention to it anyway for a few reasons. One is that we evolved to think specifically about interpersonal violence (~5-15% of prehistoric deaths, but way more than that for non-old people), which makes us good at luridly imagining interpersonal violence, and so comparatively we're bad at thinking about an early death due to diabetes and therefore bad at caring about it. Another reason is it's a hot-button red team/blue team political issue, so it's not so much about the issue per se but rather whether $OTHER_SIDE gets what it wants or not.