I concur. As I said, I find these results counterintuitive, despite the fact that they superficially seem to support my political position. They seem to support my position TOO WELL, and that makes me quite suspicious of them.

If I had to take a guess, I'd say that in reality, gun control laws have very little effect, in either direction, on crime rates, and that the causation behind this correlation, if there is any at all, runs in the opposite direction as would be implied by the naive reading: countries which have high crime rates tend to pass strict gun control laws as a reaction to those high crime rates, while countries with low crime rates never bother passing gun control laws, since they don't see the need. In other words, I think it's more likely that high crime rates cause strict gun control laws, rather than strict gun control laws causing high crime rates.