QUOTE (Brazilian_Shinobi @ Nov 9 2011, 07:03 PM)

Guns don't kill people.
People kill people.
And stupid, poor people kill more people than educated, wealthy people kill people.
But if educated, wealthy people really, really want to they can kill EVEN MOAR people and likely as not they'll even find a stupid person to pull the trigger for them, so they'll get away with it.
Hyperbole, though.
@Daylen: Probably history should teach that statistics are about as ambiguous as guns (for those of us for whom they have an ambiguous nature). They are either really powerful in evaluating something, or really useless or really dangerous in a political context. So... in theory, it should be possible to make a meaningful statistic about this question.
I want to provide one more thought to the gun=society idea: Apart from any ethical questions my main problem with (in the extreme case) giving a gun to everyone and telling them to always openly carry it is that individual empowerment does not work on a societal, or even on a group level - and it makes a society impossible to police, in the extreme case. For instance, in the US there have in recent history, let's say 50-60 years, been various riots. What if each of those rioters had been armed? The imagined outcome is critically close to civil war in every case.
I'm not saying there aren't up-sides to this: I can totally relate to the thought that a state should never be able to rule against its citizens, and that they should be able to defend themselves.
However, power is a reality, and power needs to assert itself, or else it ain't power. And the more force it needs to do that, the more bloody the conflict. Sounds like an invitation to become obedient sheep, but it's not, we're still talking about democratic states, here. So the resistance to the powers that be - due to their authority based on the will of the voters - needs a moral high ground, or else it's just bullying, and that means it can't be violent, or at least can't be the originator of violence, or at least can't take it to that level where the rest of society will shun them entirely. But angry people are very, very often originators of violence, and in this case I would prefer them to be unarmed - rocks and clubs, while quite effective on an indididual level - just aren't as dangerous as firearms.
So, this brings us back to what doesn't go well with firearms: Alcohol, stupidity and angry people. Anything else?
All I'm saying is that for me there isn't a GOOD answer to this question, but there is a nominally SAFER one - and that brings us back to statistics. Which... aren't available in a satisfactory manner both with regards to information density and lack of bias.