While I believe an armed society is a polite society, I also think gun control or the lack thereof has little or no impact on crime stats.
The big driver of crime stats is the available number of criminals a locale has. The difference in crime between Chicago and Montpelier VT is not the level of gun control. VT just doesn’t have many criminals with or without gun control.
It’s high time for criminal control.
And if you look at some of the worst criminal controlled hell-holes in the country you will find them all in democrat controlled areas, usually near streets named “Martin Luther King Boulevard”
I have studied this for four decades. Guns in the hands of responsible people tend to have a small, but measurable effect on reducing crimes.
The biggest predictor of crime rates is culture. Crime rates tend to be similar in cultures derived from the same base, around the world.
Cultures that have high crime rates are those that do not have an expectation that the rule of law will be enforced in any meaningful way. Cultures that expect enforcement of the rule of law have much lower crime rates.