You’re still missing the forest for the trees. You keep insisting none of these things are unique to the U.S., but the point isn't that they exist somewhere else, it's the scale, intensity, and intersections of those issues together that are uniquely American. Yes, other Western countries have poverty, gangs, and broken homes, but they don't have 50+ years of urban policy disasters, destabilized inner cities, or a racial history that carved entire neighborhoods into generational ghettos. They don’t have anything close to the same concentration of these issues, nor do they sit on a border flooded by cartel warfare. As for your fallback claim that it’s all about “gun culture”, fine, then define it. Because that term often gets thrown around like a rag doll, but it rarely gets defined. So, is it the number of guns? The attitude toward them? The lack of trust in police that makes people arm themselves? The frontier mythology? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a cultural response to the same systemic rot we’ve been talking about? Regarding Canada, they don’t have the same gun ownership rate, but it’s relatively high for a Western nation, and they’re geographically, economically, and culturally closer to the U.S. than most. Yet their homicide rates are significantly lower. Again, if it were just about guns, we’d expect a much tighter correlation. So no, I’m not denying that gun access matters. I’m denying that it's the whole story. You’re taking one variable in a complex equation and pretending it explains the whole sum. That’s not analysis, that’s ideology.
