I think the problems are unrelated to gun ownership. If you were to plot the percent of gun ownership vs the crime rate among various states or even countries, you wouldn't find much of a correlation.
Overall crime, no, there is no correlation, but there is for guns used in crimes, which dramatically increases the rate of deaths and severity of those crimes.
A criminal mind would use the tools available and a gun makes throwing rocks (chunks of lead) at people deadly more often than using your hand.
Look at criminal states, those leaders use armies instead of guns because they have an army available.
https://medium.com/@tgof137/gun-ownership-rates-do-not-predi...
The studies in your link are after "controlling for poverty and urbanization", "after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation", etc.
I'm not a statistician enough to argue the methodology of the papers, but I'll say given that the trend only emerges after lots of adjustments, it makes me a little skeptical. At least, it would be pretty easy to let some bias or motivated reasoning slip in.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...
"Firearm prevalence is significantly related to total violent crime (B = .600, p < .05). With each unit increase in firearm prevalence, the expected count of the violent crime index increases by .600. This also indicates that the percent change in the total violent crime is an 82% increase for every unit increase in firearm ownership. The prevalence of guns does significantly increase the violent crime in the county. This finding is consistent with previous research on firearm prevalence and crime both in the United States and internationally."
[1]: http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/jpj_firearm_owner...
>Firearm prevalence in the United States is difficult to determine because there is no database that collects information on firearm ownership and prevalence. Thus, analyses that study firearm prevalence have had to develop proxies for firearm ownership. As a proxy for firearm ownership, the current analysis used the percentage of suicides by a firearm from 2000 to 2010.
Little tricks like this are why people lose faith in science.
Exactly, if the same logic for guns were used on other things then you'd have people up in arms saying nobody should be able to drive cars because of how many people kill others with them.