How "true" this statement is (with all its flaws) really depends on the country. If you look at gun ownership over the world as a whole and individual countries

How "true" this statement is (with all its flaws) really depends on the country. If you look at gun ownership over the world as a whole and individual countries we can see that some countries have very high gun ownership, like the USA, but they do also share the homicide rate. This if anything shows its possible to have guns within the community without large numbers of murders and accidents. In America the argument is regularly used to defend the position of maintaining the gun laws as they are, as right, but its actually quite true that as a culture Americans kill each other more than many other developed countries. That isn't really the gun, they are the weapon of choice but as an outsider looking in I see a lot of violence and it appears to be associated with the cultural heritage in your country. I visited Las Vegas earlier in the year and I spent some time in a range there firing all sorts of assault rifles and pistols and such. I love firing weapons and here in the UK I am limited in what I can do, no assault rifles for example nor even a 9mm pistol. But one thing an ex marine working on the range said was "I think the USA has a violence problem and guns make it worse". I think that is the truth and until the USA really starts talking about why they have so many people in prison, why its so disproportionately black people, why the homicide rate is so high when compared to most other developed countries the fix isn't going to be obvious. If you remove guns it might help reduce the lethality of the violence, maybe more people will survive knife and other attacks, but its not going to actually solve the underlying reasons for the violence. The problem is there are two sides to this, people using guns kill people, and people not using guns also kill people: Guns AND People => Death is TRUE People AND NOT Guns => Death is also TRUE Guns are thus irrelevant, its a term that can be removed entirely and the statement reduced to people killing people. The question is really do guns increase the amount of deaths due to their relatively lethality and ease of death dealing and that most probably is true compared to most other personal weapons due to there range and the damage they inflict. But People killing People as I have pointed out has dramatically different rates in different countries, guns don't necessarily increase homicides that is all based on the culture and laws of a country.