Of course a country with more firearms is going to have more firearm-related deaths. The same is true for automobiles or bridges or baseball bats. The relevant question is what the overall death rate is.
For instance, Japan, per capita, has fewer firearms-related suicides than the US, but it has more suicides. I’d be willing to bet it has more train-related suicides than the US. Does this mean Japan’s suicide rate would go down if they had fewer trains and more guns? No, it just means that suicidal Japanese use the tools that are available to them, as do suicidal Americans.
Britain has very low rates of gun violence. But it has increasing rates of knife violence. Is this because Brits have too much access to knives? Or is it because violent people use the tools that are available to them? Britain is cracking down on knives, but even if they make it nigh-impossible to peacefully chop vegetables in your own kitchen, British criminals will just switch to screwdrivers or cricket bats or the Millwall Brick. But hey, at least you won’t have any more British toddlers getting hurt by playing with kitchen knives.
> I wish Americans could get a feeling of how different a society without a perpetual feeling of danger and paranoia feels like. Where children just go to school without security checks, amok drills and bulletproof safe rooms.
Americans a century ago were just as well armed as today (perhaps more so) and had none of that nonsense. It used to be that if you were an American teenager in a rural area, you could even drive to school with your hunting rifle still in your pickup and nobody would care.