Photo Credit: Noodlepie

A recent piece in Nouse (Americans should not lose the right to bear arms: Daniel Cooper, 26/09 ) made a bold statement - calls for greater gun control in the US are misguided, 'ridiculous' even.There were two pillars to this argument. First, it is a practical impossibility - 'attempting to confiscate all of America's guns would be a literally impossible task'. Second, and this is the central argument, evidence suggests 'introducing more gun control does not lead to lower levels of violent crime'.Nice thesis. But a closer look at the data debunks this starling assertion. It is wrong firstly because Cooper treats gun ownership as gun control, and secondly because he looks at overall crime and homicide rates - both of which have far too many muddying factors to allow any link with guns to be even tentatively proposed. The key is gun-related deaths, and the effect gun control laws have on them.As my guide to all things political, Toby Ziegler, once said in The West Wing, 'If you combine the populations of Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, and Australia, you'll get a population roughly the size of the United States. We had 32,000 gun deaths last year, they had 112. ... Do you think it's because Americans are more homicidal, or do you think it's because those people have gun control laws?'Updating those stats gives you a slightly less warped picture, but shows the United States has more than 23 times as many gun deaths as the other eight combined (and they actually add up to a country with 50 million more people).Now while such a subjective selection works well on TV it carries no statistical weight. But we can add to it. As this data from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows (available here ), there is a clear and strong correlation between gun control laws and the number of gun-related homicides.This graph compares gun-related deaths with gun controls across US states. I gave each state a score from 0 to 3 depending on how many of three control laws it has - a safe storage requirement, trigger locks, and an assault weapons ban. The data shows a very strong (-0.67) negative correlation: more gun control equals fewer deaths.This is not a unique result. A joint study published in March, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, showed 'states with the most [gun control] laws had a 42 percent lower gun death rate than states with the least number of laws'.These are the grounds on which any argument over gun control must take place. This data also works well because US gun laws are comparable. The same cannot be said for one of Cooper's statistical pillars - Telegraph coverage of a Conservative Party-compiled analysis of violent crime, made to throw at Labour during the 2010 election.As the Telegraph notes, comparisons of crime data 'must be viewed with caution'; in the words of the Home Office, thanks to differences in how crimes are recorded, 'different countries are simply not comparable.'Comparisons with general homicide figures are equally useless. In the US 60% of homicide deaths are gun-related, in Lithuania less than 3% are; there are plenty of factors which can cause homicide to rise even if gun deaths fall.It is a gun debate that focuses on such factors that is misguided. Equally, Cooper wrongly looks at the ownership rather than control of weapons. He suggests more guns do not lead to more deaths, citing the gun-hoarding but peaceful Fins among others.While a raft of analysis, from the Harvard Injury Control Research Center to a recent paper in the American Journal of Medicine, disagrees with him, the comparison I ran of over 100 countries, using data from UNODC and the Small Arms Survey, was inconclusive.The correlation between the two - ownership and deaths - was very weak (-0.10). But beyond being widely disputed, it is anyway irrelevant. Gun control advocates are not trying to create Simpsons-esque town burnings of all America's guns; we needn't worry about its impracticality. Ownership is not the problem, control is.As recent CNN polling has shown, fewer than 10% of Americans want to get rid of all guns. What they want is measures like mandatory registrations, no guns for felons, and background checks - which over 90% of Americans support.That might help prevent a repeat of the last thirty years, during which almost half of the perpetrators of the US's 61 mass murders obtained their guns legally. It is no coincidence 15 of the world's 25 worst shootings in the past 50 years took place in America. And it is the refusal of gun-apologists to face the facts that is 'ridiculous'.