In most of these discussions, one side can point out places where guns are illegal, with low gun crime. The other side can point to places where guns are illegal, and gun crime is high. In the same vein there are places where guns are all over the place, with low crime, and places full of guns where everyone is killing each other.

What's the deal?

Actually, Lee is right.

Violence increases when cultures collide. All else being largely equal, it's really that simple. If you look at all the examples people list in the first paragraph above, the one thing that stands out is that nations, cities, or other groups of people that are homogenous tend to have much lower violence rates. Even if they have guns in every home.

The problem is a natural human response to "the other," buried deep in our monkey bones. It can be race, culture, religion, language, or which end of the egg you break to peel it.

When everyone around you is like you, there's less conflict. Usually, nations with strict gun laws and low violence had low violence before the gun laws were there.

So, if this is the issue instead of the availability of guns, how to fix it?

You can't. In fact, you don't want to. This is one of those things where the benefits have to be balanced against the problems, and the benefit is that cultural collision very often results in cultural improvement. Cultures are a lot like genetics in that way.

You can point to enclaves like Korea, Japan, or Switzerland, and see how nice and quiet things are when almost everyone is on the same page. But some of the greatest innovations come from huge melting pots like the U.S. Inbreeding is not good for progress in cultures any more than it is in genetics.

Frankly, in a nation of 300 million widely-varied people, it's a miracle our violence rate is as low as it is.

This is, of course, a very simple overview, and when you get into it, other factors show up that would have to be taken into account by a serious study, but the homogeneity factor holds up for the odd gun/violence discrepancies in every example I've been able to think of off hand.