The whole idea that weapons are needed to keep the federal government honest is a nutter's fantasy, a century out of date. You think some militia is going to topple the tyrannical reign of noted socialist Comrade Obama? That's just sad.
I didn't remove half the world to suit my argument, I estimated where is comparable in terms of poverty, law enforcement and such like and came up with western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. I haven't performed scientific research for obvious reasons, but I think that's a fair comparison and there's correlation alright. Russia? It has tight gun laws, but it also has notoriously slack policing. I thought Canada had tighter gun laws and certainly has lower gun ownership. Plus, they're too polite to shot someone.
You can't criticise me for not accounting for these variables and then criticise me because I did account for them. The reason they help my argument is because I'm right.
As for mental health, it seems everyone's talking about it (as SMA says). Certainly I'm all in favour of making healthcare more widely available but I gather large segments of the US population aren't and I think they may overlap with those who don't want gun control. But the big problem is ... what exactly is supposed to be done? Unless crazy people line up to be registered as unfit to own a gun, it's not going to do a whole lot. Certainly if someone has a history of violent conduct then the checks and limits should be stricter but 99.99% of the population aren't checked to see if they're crazy or not.
As a liberal, I'd actually quite like guns to be available. However, the principal of "that's why we can't have nice things" means that it's trouble and having anything more deadly than shotguns and such like will, and all too regularly has, caused nothing but tears.