Is the guns and violence equation different in the USA than elsewhere?

Okay... getting over my skepticism of Branch here. Do we want to start with some shared set of premises? For example, can we accept that there should be some legitimate individual uses for firearms, and any system to limit their sale, transportation, etc. should make sure those legitimate uses are still possible? If we agree, can we move on to naming those uses and naming uses that are collective and NOT individual?

An argument I have heard presented is that levels of mugging and other violent crime are higher in Europe (which has more strict gun controls) than in the US, and (so the argument goes) the fact that people carry guns in the US is a causal factor in our rates being lower. I've never seen data that controls for things like population density, per-capita numbers of Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs), and immigration so that this argument would be solidly convincing. I'm willing to believe that there's a tradeoff between availability of various kinds of guns (esp. semi-automatic handguns) and certain kinds of crime, but I'd want it to be clear what the apples-to-apples comparison is and I'd want us to actually be choosing to make that tradeoff.

This may already be obvious, but it bears repeating: the NRA does not speak for gun owners. If you want evidence, here's survey data (graphs) from a December 2011 YouGov poll: themonkeycage.org

Thanks Cristóbal for chiming in. I'm back from traveling!

So, over the years and also as a result of reading done around the recent shooting, I've never seen anyone present strong evidence of various gun control measures significantly controlling crime or murder.

There are certainly many cases of there being a correlation between no guns and lower murder (harvard school of public health): hsph.harvard.edu

(and just by casually perusing murders per capita vs. guns per capital in US states)

This meta analysis asserts that gun control does NOT control crime (harvard school of government): journalistsresource.org

And there is the example of the Australia gun control and buyback program. It reduced murder with guns... but didn't reduce murder or crime.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

"For the same period, despite the declines related to firearms,overall suicide and homicide rates in Victoria did not show asimilar decline"

So, the only certain thing that regulating certain types of weapons like the AR-15 would result in is the severity of mass shootings (which may be a perfectly good thing to try to reduce, but the overall homicide reduction would be very minimal).