Homicide rates in Europe

Okay, so no murder was committed and no body found in or around Bremen since the ones I wrote about last time but I still thought it was time to write a new post. When I was trying to find out about murder rates in Europe, complementary to my first post, I stumbled across a very interesting site. It's called europeansafetyobservatoty.eu and offers several reports on, well...European safety :) In one of them I found the general numbers I was looking for: The average homicide rate for the USA is 5.5 per 100.000 while in Europe it is 1 per 100.000. The researcher links this in part to the ownership rates in handguns. 4% of EU households have a gun, pretty high number I thought...29% of American households have a gun, ridiculously high number!!! But I don't want to rant about guns in America, we got Michael Moore for this - this time I want to concentrate on the European numbers. The reports unfortunately don't include any other mentioning of homicide rates...but, luckily I found those on the website of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, so here it goes: (just as a comparison, the number they give for the US is 5.2). All the numbers are between 0 and 4 (Iceland and Monaco actually have 0, no need to kill if you're rich...or got a nice volcano to distract I guess). But there are a few exceptions: Lithuania 8.6, Latvia 4.4, Estonia 6.3, Ukraine 6.3, Belarus 5.6, Republic of Moldova 5.1 and in undisputed first place Russia with 14.2! (All the numbers are from 2007 or 2008)
Obviously all of these are Eastern European countries but that can not be an explanation as for example Poland has a rate of 1.2, Hungary 1.5 and Slovakia 1.7.
Now as you might have expected Sweden and Norway are among the less homicidal countries (seems they are indeed practically perfect in every way as Mary Poppins would say), but surprisingly they are accompanied by Spain and Slovenia!
All these numbers are fascinating and I have no idea how to explain them but I promise I will do some further research on this. Also I thought I could try to find out some numbers concerning suicides...watch out for my next post, as I will continue writing about my favourite topic ;)