How murderous are we really?

Just after our two most recent mass shootings, I've read this New Yorker article exploring the history of murder in America. The article reviews various authors' differences of opinion on why America is more dangerous than other, roughly comparable places, but never questions the hypothesis that America is more dangerous. Weirdly, despite myself having twice been threatened with guns in America, the article made me think America may actually be safer than Europe for this reason: we have been more successful than Europe in recent decades in avoiding full-blown civil wars and politically organized massacres.

Because the law distinguishes between killings during war and killings during peacetime, so does the article. This made me wonder: what were the murder rates in, say, Germany during the 30s and 40s, Northern Ireland in the 70s and Yugoslavia in the 90s? Perhaps quite low, but this didn't make them great places to raise a family. If killings inspired or mandated by political movements were added to the deaths officially classified as homicides, creating an intentional killings rate instead of a murder rate, how would we compare then?

I remain, at best, dubious that widespread private ownership of guns is a net positive for public safety. All the evidence I've ever seen is that it's a net negative. But I do think we should ask whether the interpersonal violence that leads to a high murder rate might also somehow be protective against (or at least negatively correlated with) civil unrest.