The interplay between desire, ability and feasibility makes for some unique case studies. One example is Israel, whose entire population is armed, and yet has a low murder rate. However, their desire to commit murder is low, because Israel is usually either at war or the threat of war, and criminologists have long known that the crime rate drops during wartime. And Switzerland also has much stricter gun control laws. Hence it is almost impossible to use these weapons for crime without detection.
Handguns are also highly regulated.
Even then Switzerland has both the highest handgun ownership and highest handgun murder rate in Europe. Now let's review the statistics, to see how the correlation between gun ownership and murder rates is borne out according to the above philosophy. To the extent that they vary, the differences can be attributed to other social factors, like gun control laws, income inequality, etc. According to a 1992 review of the scientific literature, most studies find that gun density is positively associated with the murder rate. The National Institute of Justice, for example, reports a study of U.S. cities which found a positive correlation between gun ownership levels and felony gun use and felony murder.