The reason so few are killed by handguns here is because of the idiots who fire them – they (the majority of neds) have no training whatsoever in their use, they then have a ‘feud’ with a rival, which involves going armed with their ‘shooter’, and when it comes to pulling the trigger, they aim for the chest or head, and invariably miss the centre of the target, thus taking an ear off, or hitting an arm/shoulder.
If they were trained in the smallest way, or had fired a gun before, then there would be more deaths, but luckily, as handguns are banned, they can never practice legally, and doing so illegally would have them arrested in short order unless they could find a suitably quiet, remote location , and being as it is mostly urban thugs who do the shooting, they are very unlikely to know somewhere where they can practice their shooting, along with the difficulty in obtaining ammunition (harder than buying an illegal gun I am told), this conspires to make us safer.
As for legally held guns, apart from the 3 outrages here in the last 25 years, we are one of the most law abiding gun owners anywhere in the World. Very few legally held guns are used in a criminal activity – the biggest danger from the owner of a legally held gun is the owner him/her self – sadly, there are a lot of suicides each year from their own gun.