Pervasive gun ownership begets gun ownership among criminals. The decision-making in whether to hold up a liquor store is intuitively different if you already o

Pervasive gun ownership begets gun ownership among criminals. The decision-making in whether to hold up a liquor store is intuitively different if you already own a gun. The spillover effect may be smaller for crimes like graffiti. However, police in the UK are less busy with serious crimes, so they can probably police graffiti better too. Then there's the Broken Windows theory. There is an independent variable (gun ubiquity) and an intuitively-related dependent variable (gun deaths.) The international data fit the association very strongly. You're not going to convince anyone that they're not related. There are other factors at play but they are minute by comparison. The 50-fold decrease is just my spitballing of where the US would fall on the graph, i.e. pretty close to the line where all the other countries are.