I don't think it does correlate . It's just a throw away statistic that shows that tougher gun laws don't have too much of an impact on those people who are actively involved in violent crime on a day to day business. These guns are often shipped over from eastern Europe and can be bought quite cheaply especially ex military weapons like that sold through russian black markets etc dealers / agents .

Reply 5

Jammy Duel

The simple answer is "it's complicated" and its complicated for a number of reasons, not least because there are other ways to kill people, the most common method of killing in the UK is sharp instrument with over the last 10 years the number of deaths in a year varying from 186 to 272, but actually that year with 272 is not the year with the highest percentage of homicides done with a sharp instrument as 2 and 5 years later 40% of homicides were with sharp instruments with 256 and 209 homicides respectively, meanwhile the year with the lowest percentage had 226 homicides by sharp instrument.

The second most common is "hitting, kicking, etc" i.e. no weapon beyond the body. On average this is half as common as sharp instrument. Next most common is strangulation closely followed by blunt instrument, these each being about one fifth the rate of stabbing over the 11 years of data I have at hand. Shooting is 20% lower than this, or about one sixth the rate of stabbings.

Over the 11 years shootings have never hit double figures in terms of percentage of all homicides and on average was only 1/15th of the total. Starting from such a low mark means that the sort of variation that has been seen cannot lead to an answer to the question within any meaningfulness.

It should also be noted that overall firearm crime went up after the 1997 acts and did not drop down to pre-ban levels until over a decade later, in the case of homicides even longer with firearm homicides not dropping below 1997 levels until 2012-13, the drop there was also so significant that it is no surprise that firearm homicides are becoming more common at this time.

Since 2009-10 figures have also been published regarding whether firearms used in homicides were registered or not and with the exception of 2010-11 (Cumbria shootings) the number of registered firearms used in homicides is low, only a handful, which is to be expected really