This would seem to support the argument that there is not a causal relationship between gun laws and crime rates.
Yup. It's more complicated than that.
Other nations may very well have violent crime centered more in urban areas and perhaps the reason for that is similar to what is happening here.
No matter where you go, there is more crime in urban areas although the specific level varies from one urban area to the another. There are some main underlying reasons for why crime concentrates in urban areas, but there are also reasons why not all urban areas have identical per capita crime rates.
On the other hand, many nations are much more homogenous with much different demographics than the US, are much smaller, and have fewer large urban areas.
Yeah, it's not that simple. That could contribute to either higher crime or lower crime depending on a number of factors. A country without much LE presence and tribal rivalries could be very violent even if it is very rural and very homogeneous in terms of race and religion. It's not hard to find examples. On the other hand, Singapore is entirely urban (city state) is pretty ethnically diverse, has very restrictive weapons laws and still has a relatively low crime rate.
I guess the take-away is that using the national crime rate to gauge how dangerous the US is is misleading since the majority of our huge country is not that bad.
Or, because the rural and suburban areas are also factored into the overall national crime rates, one could say that they are misleading about the crime rates of urban areas because the urban areas tend to have higher crime than the national average would suggest.
The point is that if you want to do a fair comparison, the comparison needs to be apples to apples.
Examples of reasonable comparisons
National crime rate of one country to national crime rate of another country.
Urban crime rate to urban crime rate.
Rural crime rate to rural crime rate.
Examples of unfair comparisons.
National crime rate of one country to urban crime rate of another country.
National crime rate of one country with the statistics of the half-dozen highest crime urban areas removed to unaltered national crime rate of another country.