You can't get more blunt than this

from the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy:

There is no social benefit in decreasing the availability of guns if the result is to increase the use of other means of suicide and murder, resulting in more or less the same amount of death. Elementary as this point is, proponents of the more guns equal more death mantra seem oblivious to it. One study asserts that Americans are more likely to be shot to death than people in the world's other 35 wealthier nations. While this is literally true, it is irrelevant-except, perhaps to people terrified not of death per se but just death by gunshot. A fact that should be of greater concern--but which the study fails to mention--is that per capita murder overall is only half as frequent in the United States as in several other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by strangling, stabbing, or beating is much more frequent.

found via BTB.