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Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service,

a statistical spotlight on a world of numerical confusion.

Last week's mass shooting at a cinema in Colorado has not surprisingly

intensified America's bitter and long-running argument with itself

about gun control. The mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg,

has called on President Obama and Mitt Romney to make gun control an election issue.

The argument is political and highly partisan, but it's also practical.

Would tighter gun laws actually lead to fewer gun deaths?

You might think it's obvious that they would, but as Wesley Stevens has been finding out,

the evidence isn't quite that clear.

Think about Britain and the US. There are between 90 and 100 guns for every

hundred people in the US. There are just 6.6 in England and Wales.

In the US, there are nearly three murders with guns for every 100,000 people each year.

That's 40 times more than in England and Wales.

Ergo, fewer guns, equal fewer incidents of gun crime, right?

Well, maybe. But consider this stat from Professor Dan Polzby,

Dean of the Law School at George Mason University in the USA, who wrote a famous article in the

mid-90s called the false promise of gun control. There are more guns in this country than there were

30 years ago by a lot. And most of the new inventory are handguns, which everybody says.

...