The Vox piece is garbage. There is only one bit of evidence that could at least support a causation between gun ownership and gun crime, and that’s the chart comparing gun ownership rate by state. But the chart Vox uses lumps in people exercising their own right to end their lives with gun crime. The chart of gun ownership rate versus homicide rate shows no correlation:
https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/everybodys-lying-a...Additionally, the international comparisons ignore the fact that the US, like the rest of the new world, has long had higher homicide rates than Europe, even before gun control and even back when guns were prevalent in Europe.
About 43% of American households own a gun. Norway, France, and Canada are all above 25%. Finland is at 50%. https://www.ippnw.org/pdf/mgs/7-1-cukier.pdf. Articles like those on Vox tend to focus on number of guns (Americans tend to stockpile them), but the figures for percentage of households with access to a gun aren’t as radically different in the US as in some other countries.
But homicide rates in the US are radically different, and always have been. The homicide rate in France has been 1 per 100,000 or less since the 1940s. The lowest the homicide rate in the US has ever been is 4-5x higher than that.