Another fun chart

[Don Corleone]

It isn't about guns. It's about the people who use them, as simple as that. Why is it that you must own a gun to be "free"? Specially since the government listens to your phone conversations anyway, and can restrict your travel and use of your own money anyway. What are guns guaranteeing? From the economic perspective they have a high cost in acquisition - licenses, their actual cost, precautions to keep them safely, etc - and a negligible chance to actually use them, kind of like your chance of winning on the roulette, so if it isn't about your freedom, and it isn't because you expect to use them, then what is the point of having them? Specially since the countries with lax gun ownership laws (like US and Switzerland) are the ones that rank highest on fatal crimes.

Or am I not understanding something?

I think we've been around and around about this, but at the end of the day, it really boils down to how you view the Social Contract. Do you view yourself as the fundamental atomic unit within the body politic, or are you a subset of a larger whole, and the fundamental element is the society itself.

I personally view myself as the autonomous unit. I am responsible for my own safety, happiness and welfare. The guarantees for these things listed in the Consitution are more of a promise not to infinge on these then they are to provide for them. I have something of an antagonistic view of government. In my mind, it is a necessary but thoroughly corrupt evil. The individuals within it may not be, in fact they may be decent and upstanding individuals (I dream of a day when they all are!) But the role of a proper functioning government is to control its citizens behavior and force them to do things that are against their own personal best interests (taxes, military service, eminent domain, etcetera). Governments may use different methods for accomplishing this, such as coercion and manipulation, but at the end of the day, governments don't actually make or do anything, they manipulate the goods and services of the autonomous individuals they control.

But even the difference between a representative democracy and a dictatorship is that in a reprsentative democracy, you get to pick who holds ultimate power over you. That's it. So, when we as free individuals enter into concourse in a venture such as government, and we agree to surrender some of our individual rights so that the group as a whole can prosper, certain guarantees need to be provided for.

That's all the Constitution is at the end of the day. I know a lot of Europeans deride American Constitutionalists for having an ideallic view of an arcane document, but it's a contract. In fact, it is THE contract.

And as I'm signing my autonomy away, I expect certain provisional protections. One of these is the right to defend myself, against intruders and against a tyranical government. Now, you can tell me "you don't really need that right" all you want, but I can make the very same argument about all other rights American citizens enjoy. Assuming I'm innocent, I don't really NEED a right not to incriminate myself, correct?

As for why more Americans die in dysfunctional conflict situations than Europeans, as I've already told you, your numbers are somewhat skewed. But even assuming the numbers of Americans murdered per 100K is dramatically higher than it is for most European countries, I would say it's a complex question that has a complex answer. One facet of it is access to firearms, sure, but that's not the only aspect.

If access to firearms was the primary reason Americans die at a higher rate than Western Europeans, you would expect Myanmar, or a host of Latin American countries that like Western Europe, have also outlawed personal firearm ownership to have zero murder rates, or at least very low ones. But your slide doesn't show countries like them (or China, or other Asian countries, or African countries for that matter).