The key international evidence of this link was submitted by the Home Office to the Dunblane inquiry. The Home Office, however, had further evidence of the relationship between firearms violence and firearms ownership levels in the UK itself, which it did not submit to Lord Cullen. The Home and Scottish Office's own figures on armed crime and firearms ownership by constabulary area show a negative correlation. The failure to present this evidence to Lord Cullen has fundamentally undermined the firearms aspect of his report, and the validity of the political decisions associated therewith. The Home Office submitted the Killias research in support of the claim that firearms homicide rates are related to firearms ownership levels in the countries surveyed.
Car ownership yields a greater correlation with firearms homicide than does firearms ownership.
Unlike the Killias data, this data set is complete, contains no estimates and uses statistics recorded in a consistent manner. It also gives a quite different result. Within the United Kingdom, areas of high legal firearms ownership have a low incidence of firearms homicide and attempted murder. With the much larger number of incidents in this category, it is clear that the relationship is stronger than linear, as indicated by the inverse-square curves shown. These are Home Office figures, and are directly relevant to Britain.