The parent comment is introducing a new variable which may or may not be useful in, as you suggest, providing targeted approaches to reducing deaths by firearms

The parent comment is introducing a new variable which may or may not be useful in, as you suggest, providing targeted approaches to reducing deaths by firearms. It still flies in te face of convention which still treats a whole country as a whole country, in the perhaps naive assumption that by averaging the nations stats you will be able to get a good comparison of what the average citizen puts up with an thus providing a ground for comparison with other average citizens in other nation-states, regardless of their level of development, or even, indeed, if they have 'inner city slums'. And all that is leaving aside the matter of whether the statement is actually true, as questioned by a number of other threads