Operation Blunt or "Cut" me some slack.

[eyebeams]

True, but one would hope that most people realize the real point of making such a claim. A ban on weapons treats the means, but not the cause of people murdering others. The often outrageous arguments made that a ban on one weapons leads to a ban on all, simply points this out. Why are we not dealing with the root cause of the problem? Probably because the root cause doesn't exist and is too complicated to call out directly. I would venture to say the homicide rate per capita in the US vs Britain has little to do with the ownership of guns and more to do with a host of problems including social and psychological.

Dealing with the means does not exclude dealing with thr root cause, so this is a false dichotomy. People can deal with root causes of violence perfectly well without letting go of the option to regulate weapons. On option does not magically disallow the other.

As for *why* the rates are different -- there's no definitive answer. Canadians have plenty of guns (about half the people I know own longarms), but don't shoot each other as often. I don't know of any attempt to correlate the US' abnormally high murder and rape rates with firearms availability and usage, but is it really any better to suggest, for the sake of defending firearms ownership, that Americans are psychologically damaged compared to that of the rest of the developed world? Given that I've liked most of the Americans I've met, I intuitively doubt that American culture is morally corrupt compared to that of the EU or Canada.