Another key consideration is that what crimes occur and what subsets of crimes occur. For example, there is no real common factor between the U.S. and U.K. in terms of home burglary rates. Both crimes are thought of as not needing guns commit the offense, and both countries use similar legal definitions of the crime (the U.S. legal system is based on the British system and because of this, you can find quite a few states with no codified law about murder... because murder was outlawed when the states were still colonies of Britain and they did have a law making murder illegal, and both legal systems allow for case law or "Precedence" to be counted as law for new cases.). Anyway, that note aside, Home Burglary in the United States and U.K. is the unlawful entry into a residence for theft of property within. I don't have the rates, but for both countries, they are typical for the rate of theft related crimes within that country.
However, if we narrow down the crime to how the perpetrator operates, we find that the U.K. has a higher rate of "Hot Burglaries" than the United States. A Burglary is said to be "Hot" if the perpetrator entered the residence while a legal occupant was present in the residence (the owner or someone who the owner allows to live in the residence). I don't recall the exact rates on hand, but 80% of all U.K. Burglaries are considered "Hot" while in the United States, about 10-15% are "Hot". While there could be a number of reasons, one of the theories for this is that in the United States, killing an intruder in one's own home in self-defense is not a crime (usually called "Castle Doctrine" and should not be confused with "Stand Your Ground" which is about Self-Defense while in a public area, not a private one.). The U.K. law would prefer the occupants to flee and only permits self-defense if they cannot flee.
Note this doesn't just mean guns... a baseball bat (cricket bat in the U.K nearest sporting equivelent) is as much a weapon as a gun in when used against an intruder. The fact that in the United States, self-defense actions are more permitted, coupled with the availability of legal firearms for self-defense, and the fact that most burglars do not desire to be killed while plying their illicit craft, means that even in the case of U.S. "Hot Burglaries" in the United States, the burglar more than likely entered the residence when he thought it was emptied and didn't think there was a problem. You don't need to be a statistical expert either, you just have to recall the Christmas Classic "Home Alone" where the antagonists spend most of the film trying to figure out if the protaganist's home is really unoccupied. Even when they find out that it is, one of the duo even protests that it's way more trouble than it's worth to rob a house where the sole occupant is a six year old boy... his partner only convinces him that the robbery is going to happen because the kid's house is the whole reason they started working the street in the first place. And as we all know, the film's climax is predicated on why this was a dumb idea on the antagonists part (although they survived for the sequel, it's not hard to find an article by a medical doctor suggesting that the robbers would have some serious life threatening injuries prior before they even got into the house, and would be dead long before the sequence concluded. For the curious, Marv would likely be dead from the burns of the flame thrower from when he entered the house, and already pretty close from the doornob branding. Harry would likely be dead from the fall down the icy stairs followed by the impact of the crowbar he was carrying and lost grip of in the fall, though he definitely wouldn't have lived after getting hit in the head by a Iron falling two stories and hitting him on the head.).
This is often the difficulty in comparing two countries with crime statistics as not all crimes are seen the same way in different countries. For example, while the United States does have a higher rate of gun crime than European Countries with strong gun crimes, of the three countries in the world that have a constitutional right to bear arms the United States has the lowest gun crime rate despite it's version of the right being the most permissive (Mexico and Guatemala are the other two, btw, and both explicitly state that they can't use guns against the government legally. The United States exists because they took up arms against the Government.). Additionally, while the United States has a high rate of deaths by gun, it's not the highest and the only figure related where the United States leads is it is the nation with the highest Gun Death Rate in which Suicide use of guns is greater than Homicide use of guns (about 2 out of every three Gun deaths in the united states are suicide). And the United States is fairly middle of the road in Suicide rate. Japan, a country with very strict gun laws, has a much higher suicide rate than the United States. In fact, when controlled for availability of guns, the Japanese will commit suicide by gun at the same rate as the United States commits suicide and homicide by gun combined.
However, Guns can be a bit contentious in this, so we can examine some other crime stats that are not inherently gun related.
These facts are all true as I have stated them:
In the United States, Youth Crime sees a spike that directly corresponds with the sale of Ice Cream.
Australia does see a spike in Youth Crime that corresponds with Ice Cream sales, but not nearly as high as the United States.
The first conclusion one might make is that Ice Cream causes kids to commit crime as both countries are seeing a spike and that the difference in the gap is the United States' larger crime rate than the Australia's. But this is wrong.
The first problem is that Ice Cream sells better at different times of the year because "summer" in the United States is "winter" in Austrailia and vice-versa. Ice Cream typically sells more in Summer than in Winter anywhere in the world, though, so Austrailia would have a season where Ice Cream sells, but not in the same part of the year. So why is the rate still less than the United States, if we control for the hemispheric differences?
Well, it has more to do with the differences in the education systems. In the United States, the school year runs from August/September to May/June depending on State. In Australia, the School year runs from January/February to Late November, again depending on state. Already a U.S. Summer Break is about 3 months, while the Australian school year is an extended Christmas holiday (with several smaller one two two week breaks built in the calendar through out the session. The U.S. typically does not have as many breaks during the school year for as long.). The wave of youth crime in the U.S. peaks during summer break, as do the sales of Ice Cream. But the wave is thought to more likely be caused by the longer break period that doesn't correspond with an extended holiday period (an Aussie kid is more likely to have an adult family at home during their longest break because it's also Christmas, where as a U.S. kid will not because their adult family members are still working during this period.).
This results in Youth Crime being a bigger problem in the U.S. in it's peak than Australia, even though both have the biggest wave in largest school break period, and the peak period of ice cream sales, and can account for both the appearance of more Ice Cream = More Crime and the rates of the correspondence being disproportional.
Removing Crime all together, its a known fact that Russia recieves more meteor impacts than any other nation in the world. This isn't because some deity hates Russian is smiting them with space rocks at them, but because there's more Russia than any other nation on the surface of the earth. If we control for total area, Russia has no more chance of meteor strikes than Vatican city. And naturally, of all the nations of the earth, none of them claim the middle of any ocean as territory. There's more ocean than Russia which would mean that a meteor impact into planet earth will more than likely hit in the ocean, which is a problem for the fish, but not for humans, who are few and far between away from dry land.
This can affect crime statistic as the United States is the third most populous nation in the world. Asking who has more gun homicides per nation depends on if your answer wants a statistic or a total number. India, has a close, but lower gun homiced rate per capita than the United States, but since India has about 4 times as many people as the United States, simple math shows us that more people will die by a gun homicide in India than in the United States. In fact, India has some of the strictest gun laws in the world will mean that more likely those killed by guns used in self-defense will still be charged with a gun crime because it's more difficult to own a gun legally in India than it is in the United States in the first place (these figures eliminates legal self defense, but the legal self-defense is defined by the country in question). It will also mean that these nations will be less safe around guns as their only exposure is to movie depictions of fire arms, which are often not the best source. Some films do go out of their way to handle it right, but most will make safe gun owners likely to cry as much as a paleontologist cries during Jurassic Park. And in the United States, legal gun owners tend to commit crime of any kind at a very low rate, let alone gun crimes. Most gun crimes are committed with illegally owned guns of one manner or another.
