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Gun ownership increases violent crime in US: Study

08 July 2015 02:57 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Higher ownership of guns in the United States has been linked to more violent crimes and overall homicides, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard University, APA reports quoting Press TV.

Firearm assaults were 6.8 times more common in US states with the most guns versus states with the least, said study researcher Michael Monuteaux, an epidemiologist and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

"We found no support for the hypothesis that owning more guns leads to a drop or a reduction in violent crime, instead, we found the opposite," Monuteaux told Live Science.

"This study suggests that it's really hard to find evidence that where there are more guns, there are less crimes, but you can easily find evidence that where there are a lot more guns, there are a lot more gun crimes," he said.

Numerous studies have found that gun ownership is directly associated with gun-related homicides, and homicide by gun is the most common type of homicide in the United States.

Boston University researcher Michael Siegel and colleagues found in a 2013 study published in the American Journal of Public Health thatover 30 years, gun ownership levels correlated with firearm homicides, such that the higher the gun ownership rate, the higher the firearm homicide rate.

Siegel and his colleagues also discovered that more access to guns means more firearm homicides.

Guns are owned by nearly one in three Americans and many of those people are part of a "social gun culture" that includes hunters and gun club members, a new survey has found.

About 29 percent of Americans own one or more of the estimated 300 million firearms in private hands in the United States, Columbia University researchers found.

In 2013, there were 16,121 total homicides 21,175 suicides by firearms in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).