I cover the handgun issue in another article, actually.
I do not have a source for international handgun proliferation data. Do you know of one? It would be an interesting thing to look at.
Handguns are clearly the choice of weapon for homicide, because handguns are concealable. I’m right with you there. But our own murder rates by handgun have fluctuated tremendously in the last 40 years, (see above link) and have been pretty continuously falling since the early 1990s, while the handgun ownership rate has not fallen at all as far as I’m aware. So locally there appears to be no clear relationship over time.
I think we can both agree, based on our mutual understanding of the handgun numbers, that gun control policies focusing specifically on rifles are going to have no impact on the “gun deaths” numbers, when they constitute only 0.7% of overall firearm deaths. But that’s an argument laid out more clearly in the other article.
