We use homicide data and the International Crime Victimization Survey to examine the role
of firearms in explaining cross-national variation in violence. We suggest that while gun
violence begets gun violence, it inhibits the tendency to engage in violence without guns.
We attribute the patterns to adversary effects—ie, the tendency of offenders to take into
account the threat posed by their adversaries. Multi-level analyses of victimization data
support the hypothesis that living in countries with high rates of gun violence lowers an …