Kittycattykitty: From your username, I hope you're a young lady. I applaud you on your choice of internet forums to study up on crime rate comparisons.
I want to strongly caution you that "Gun deaths" is an unfair comparison, unless you sincerely believe that other deaths are less important. As an example, if you lived in Queensland, and had 3 homicides per 100,000 people, while the folks in Montana had 2 homicides per 100,000 people, it would be a extremely broad conclusion that folks in Montana are safer from homicide than folks in Queensland. If however you change the premise to "gun homicides", and 8 of every 10 murder victims in Montana is killed with a gun, while only 1 of every 10 murder victims in Queensland is killed with a gun, if you don't present the earlier (overall murder rate) figure at the beginning of your report as a huge caveat, it could give your readers/listeners the false impression that being slightly safer from a death by gunshot, but far more likely to suffer a death by being beaten with a large stick or stone is preferable. If your teacher assigned you a topic of "annual gun deaths" rather than annual homicides, or annual homicides/suicides/accidents it's a fair bet that they are deliberately or accidentally leading you down a path of false security by giving the impression that "gun deaths" are worse than other deaths. This is an almost universal statistical deception used by anti-gun people everywhere.
Young people these days want to be rebellious. So be rebellious. If your teacher assigned you "gun deaths", tell your class "Mr. or Ms. x assigned us a project based upon a faulty premise". I dare you
Now, that said. Here is an excellent starter for your paper.
It is called
A Statistical Comparison Of Homicide Rates In The Prairie Provinces And Four American Border States, 1978 - 1992
It was a scholarly study done by a Canadian MP. As a very quick overview, Canada has roughly similar homicide rates to Australia as a whole, a lower overall violent crime rates. This study shows that the portions of America that are best equivalent to Canada geographically and demographically (Montana included in the study) have lower homicide and violent crime rates.
one graph from the study
http://teapot.usask.ca/cdn-firearms/Gov/morrison2.html
