How come Europe and Japan have far lower murder rates and strict gun control?

USA has more murders per year than the entire of Europe and Europe has less guns. So much for your "bizarre paradox". If you had read the page you cited you would see that it says : Academic studies that have rejected Lott's conclusions include the following.

With the exception of the 2003 study by John J. Donohue, these studies generally contend that there seems to be little or no effect on crime from the passage of license-to-carry laws. Donohue's 2003 study finds an increase in violence.

Jens Ludwig, Do Permissive Concealed-Carry Laws Reduce Violent Crime? Unpublished draft dated Oct. 8, 1996, on file with Albert Alschuler. Ludwig notes a correlation between PPBF4049 (percent of population black, female, aged 40 to 49) and high crime rates in the data used in the Lott & Mustard crime trends regressions.

(This factor is found as a correlation, but is not cited in Lott & Mustard 1997 as a causation.) Albert Alschuler, Two Guns, Four Guns, Six Guns, More Guns: Does Arming the Public Reduce Crime? Valparaiso U Law Rev. Spring 1997. Alschuler notes that while PPBM2029 (as perpetrators of crime) and PPBF64+ (as victims) are strongly correlated to high homicide rates in the dataset used by Lott & Mustard 1997, PPBF4049 is rated more highly as a predictor of homicide rate.

Alschuler notes that Lott supplied him with his copy of Ludwig's 1996 paper as well as the Lott & Mustard data. Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, Concealed Handguns: The Counterfeit Deterrent, 7 The Responsive Community 2 (Spring 1997). Zimring & Hawkins cite recognition of the legitimacy of defensive gun use as an impediment to the socially desirable goal of eliminating private ownership of handguns and set out to criticise Lott & Mustard.

Both Albert Alschuler and Jens Ludwig note a number of problems in their separate papers. Why, for example, should the concentration of older black women in a population predict higher crime rates in the Lott and Mustard model, but not the increased concentration of young men, age 20 to 29, who are vastly more likely to commit such offenses? David Hemenway, 'Review of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws', New England Journal of Medicine, 1998.10 Hemenway's review states Lott finds, for example, that both increasing the rate of unemployment and reducing income reduces the rate of violent crimes and that reducing the number of black women 40 years old or older (who are rarely either perpetrators or victims of murder) substantially reduces murder rates.

Indeed, according to Lott's results, getting rid of older black women will lead to a more dramatic reduction in homicide rates than increasing arrest rates or enacting shall-issue laws Rutgers sociology professor Ted Goertzel stated that "Lott’s massive data set was simply unsuitable for his task", and that he "compared trends in Idaho and West Virginia and Mississippi with trends in Washington, D.C. and New York City" without proper statistical controls. He alleged that econometric methods (such as the Lott & Mustard RTC study or the Levitt & Donohue abortion study) are susceptible to misuse and can even become junk science. 11 Ian Ayres, Yale Law School, and John Donohue, Stanford Law School, 'Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis'.

Stanford Law Review, 2003.12 Jens Ludwig, Georgetown University, "Concealed-Gun-Carrying Laws and Violent Crime: Evidence from State Panel Data", published in International Review of Law and Economics, 1998.13.

Japan also one of the highest suicide rates in the world. This could be a side discussion to add to your paradox theory. I think you are comparing apples to oranges.

In Japan, the whole country has one rule - guns are banned. In the US, every state has a rule, so someone in Chicago or DC could easily travel to place where the rules are less restrictive and purchase a gun.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.