[Straight Vermonter]

First, if you split the US statistics up into state numbers and did it by population numbers...then several states like New Hampshire and Hawaii would easily match up with Germany or the Netherlands.

Vermont had 8 murders in 2011, with a population of 600,000 people. That's a rate of 1.33 per 100k people in a state where >40% own a gun. Germany's rate is 0.9 (with 30% gun ownership) and the Netherlands is 1.1 (with 3.9% gun ownership).

[pepsionice]

It would be interesting to take apart the eight Vermont murders in 2011, and see if drugs or alcohol played any part of each homicide.