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taelor comments on Gun Control: How would we know? - Less Wrong
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With this kind of question that borders on political/identity issues, they very first thing you do is build your lines of retreat: If guns cause death, what should you do? If guns don't cause death, what should you do? If guns reduce death, what should you do? You need satisfactory non-straw answers for all of those cases before you are qualified to look at the facts. After you have those answers, you will find it much easier to be neutral.
I think you'd have to notice the (anti)correllation between gun control and violent death across countries/states/areas, if it exists, then look at the three hypotheses: guns cause death, death causes guns, something causes both. Try to eliminate hypotheses.
You could note that Canada has more guns per capita and less murder. You could control for the effect of legislation by finding different groups of people who kill each other with guns or don't who live in the same legislative areas. You could find a culturally homogenous group who are split by arbitrary political lines (i.e. toronto/detroit/buffalo/etc, that country that is split in two in the carribean). etc.
Point of order: I'm assuming that by "that country that is split in two in the carribean" you are referring to the island of Hispaniola, which is divided between the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which are not especially culturally homogenous (if your refering to a different carribean island, then ignore this).
I was referring to that one. I expected them to be culturally similar because that border is awful straight, but if they aren't, they aren't.
Do you know more about what the differences are and where they came from? Is it differences in political history? Different groups of people?
EDIT: Toronto and Detroit aren't all that similar either. I wonder where you could find a good case where legislation is the only difference between two populations.
Haiti and the Dominican have remarkably different political histories - Haiti has a lot more awful dictators in its past. They're poor comparisons. Toronto and Detroit are probably even worse - Detroit is an industrial centre whose industry rotted out around the same time as it was levelled(metaphorically) by race riots and people fleeing from them. Toronto is a financial and cultural centre whose primary challenge is that they're short a freeway or two and the commute times are bad. If you want to compare Toronto to anything, NYC or maybe Chicago are the obvious candidates.
As for a close cross-border comparison, I propose Seattle and Vancouver. They're close, similarly sized, and culturally close. You can also look at smaller examples(Sault Ste Marie ON/MI, Niagara Falls ON/NY, etc.), but it's harder to get good data from those due to scale, even though they are even closer in geographic and cultural terms.
North and South Korea just after the split is probably closest to what your looking for, though currently, they have 50 years of differing political histories separating them. Still probably better than most examples.
Both countries share a cultural inheritance from the native Taino people, but how much of that was able to escape post-contact ethnocide is a matter of debate. The two countires were united under first Spanish and then French colonial rule, but following the end of colonialism, the mainly Spanish-speaking east engaged in a hard fought war of independance from the French-speaking west. The "awful straight" border you noticed was the end result of this war.
In my limited-ish experience, some Canadian border towns (Niagra Falls, in particular) get pretty close, but you'll get lots of people on both sides that concentrate on their national identity.