In 2014 for example (before the BLM-era homicide increase) for the states they studied the total homicide rate (all causes) per 100k
Non-hispanic white americans: 2.03
Hispanic: 2.94
Black: 15.98

2014, gun-homicide only, per 100k
Non-hispanic white: 1.10
Hispanic: 1.92
Black: 12.69

So yes, white america has a higher homicide rate than europe, but the reason the numbers look so high is because “American” includes these different sub-populations that don’t belong together. The same thing comes out in suicide rates.

Non-h white: 16.23
Hispanic: 5.05
Black: 5.22

People who are anti-gun mix-and-match these stats to try and get their way. They do this when they talk about how immigrants have a lower crime rate than native born americans, they do this when they talk about “gun-deaths” pretending that suicide and homicide are all the same thing.

Black america has a homicide problem, white america has a suicide problem.

What these numbers say: the US has almost as many non-gun homicides as Europe, and then has >5x as many gun homicides as Europe, and the magnitude of the latter difference is much higher than the former. That would suggest that most gun homicides in the US are not merely ‘substituting’ guns for other methods. So no, these numbers do not, a priori, suggest that guns aren’t a factor.

Maybe some other factor drives up homicides in the US, and absent guns people would just as easily commit homicides as with guns, but that’s not specifically suggested by the numbers cited.

The indirect causal link one might make is that drug dealers and burglars are much more likely to commit murder at some point than the average person, and so incarceration for non-homicides still greatly reduces homicide rates. This theory dovetails well with the ‘security hypothesis’ for explaining the 1990s drop in crime rates, but less so with Canada’s similar drop in crime without an increase in incarceration.

1,500 gun homicides per year in all of Europe, around 20 percent of total homicides. For a comparable period there were nearly 12,000 annual gun homicides in the United States, eight times as many as Europe, and guns were responsible for 67 percent of all killings.

This seems to say, roughly, that US non-gun homicides are almost as high as all EU homicides.

This isn’t a gun issue, it’s a homicide issue. The rest is stamp collecting.

There’s a lot more crime than trials or guilty pleas.
incarceration rates in America, while high relative to that in other countries, is not high relative to the dangers that the criminal population presents. …
many offenders go unpunished. This includes those who commit an estimated 3.3 million unreported offenses a year as well as thousands of reported crimes that the police never solve, including 86 percent of burglaries, 70 percent of robberies, and 67 percent of rapes.

Lots of freedom, lots of crime; lots of punishment for crime, lots of prison time.
Even the freedom of the innocent to own guns gives more freedom to the criminals to use guns in crime.

This is a huge reason house prices, “in good areas” (low crime!), are so high. Among other distortions.

The racial differences seem to be non-discussed, and are probably out of bounds for any discussion because such a discussion would be called racist.

When I think of using handguns for self defense I think of George Zimmerman. Even when you succeed, you still lose.