You don't like the dept of justice statistics, how about a peer-reviewed study?
http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/full/92/12/1988
In the United States, regions and states with higher rates of firearm ownership have significantly higher homicide victimization rates. This result is driven primarily by gun-related homicide victimization rates, although non–gun-related victimization rates were also higher in states with higher rates of firearm ownership. The close correspondence between our proxy (FS/S) and survey-based (GSS) measures of household firearm ownership is readily apparent in Table 1, in which results obtained with survey and proxy measures are nearly identical.
The association between higher household gun ownership rates and higher overall homicide rates is robust. Regressions were driven neither by either the most populous states nor by the states with the most extreme rates of gun ownership. Overall, the results obtained when we analyzed all 50 states and the 40 least and 40 most populous states were equivalent to those obtained when analyses excluded the 10 states most extreme in FS/S (i.e., the 5 states with the highest FS/S and the 5 states with the lowest FS/S). The firearm–homicide association remained significant even when state-level analyses controlled for rates of poverty, urbanization, unemployment, per capita alcohol consumption, and violent crimes other than homicide (i.e., aggravated assault, forcible rape, and robbery). In fact, the cross-sectional association between rates of firearm ownership and homicide victimization was so stable over time that regressions across states in any given year produced point estimates that were within 8% of the point estimate obtained when all 10 years of data were analyzed.
The association between household firearm ownership rates and homicide rates held for virtually all age groups and was particularly strong for adults aged 25 years and older. An example is the category of homicide victims aged 35 to 44 years. Table 2 indicates that in a comparison of states that differed by 1 standard deviation in our firearm proxy (FS/S), the homicide rate was on average 35% higher in the states with the higher FS/S (i.e., multivariate IRR = 1.35). Given that FS/S was 4-fold higher in states with the lowest relative to those with the highest gun ownership rates, our multivariate model suggested that the homicide rate in the high-gun states would be 3.3 times that in the low-gun states (35% compounded 4-fold), and our bivariate model suggested a 3-fold difference (32% compounded 4-fold). Table 3 presents the corresponding bivariate comparison of the actual number of homicide victims in the states with the 4 lowest and the 6 highest gun ownership rates: for victims aged 35 to 44 years, homicide rates were 3.4 times higher in the high-gun states.
One reason that FS/S may be such a good proxy for household firearm ownership is that guns used for suicide appear typically to be household guns. However, guns used in homicide, especially homicides committed by adolescents and young adults, may often be obtained on the street. If, as has been reported,32–34 it is relatively easy for adolescents and young adults to acquire illegal guns on the street, the association between household gun ownership incidence and rates of homicide committed by this age group might be diluted by this alternative source of firearms. Because individuals murdered by 15- to 24-year-olds tend to be other 15- to 24-year-olds,35 this may explain, in part, our finding that the association between household firearm ownership and the rate of homicide was stronger among adults 25 years and older than it was among younger adults and adolescents. Consistent with this possibility, others have found that in areas with few guns and strict gun control laws, criminal adolescents and young adults appear to obtain their firearms via gun runners who purchase the weapons in states with more permissive gun laws.32
Neither survey estimates of household firearm ownership nor our proxy is an ideal measure of firearm availability. Surveys typically underrepresent poor people, and women living in 2-adult households with guns do not always have accurate information about whether a gun is present in their home.36,37 In addition, household firearm ownership rates indicate nothing about the number of guns per household, storage practices, or the ease with which high-risk individuals can obtain firearms in secondary market transfers. Given that household firearm ownership rates are likely to be only a crude measure of firearm availability, the robust association we report between measures of firearm prevalence and rates of homicide is striking.
Our study included only a limited number of potential confounders—poverty, urbanization, unemployment, alcohol consumption, and violent crimes (aggravated assault, forcible rape, and robbery)—and then only in state-level analyses. We found, consistent with previous work, that homicide rates were higher in areas with higher rates of urbanization, poverty, and nonlethal violent crime (not shown),25–28 but many other factors may affect homicide rates. It is not clear, however, whether accounting for these or other areawide characteristics would increase or reduce the magnitude or significance of the association between rates of household firearm ownership and homicide.
Our study did not provide information about causation. One approach to evaluating causal direction is to use a lagged measure of the key independent variable. Our finding that a lagged measure of firearm ownership yielded results similar to results obtained with contemporaneous ownership and homicide measures is consistent with higher gun ownership rates leading to higher homicide rates. However, this result does not rule out the possibility that reverse causation or a noncausal explanation accounts for the association between rates of firearm ownership and homicide. It is possible, for example, that locally elevated homicide rates may have led to increased local gun acquisition. Unfortunately, we were unable to resolve this issue, in part because cross-sectional patterns of gun ownership rates across the United States are so stable over time.19
The current study adds to previous work by using recent data, looking across both regions and all 50 states, disaggregating victims by age, and adjusting for several potential confounders not previously accounted for in nationally representative studies.
We found that across US regions and states, and for virtually every age group, higher rates of household firearm ownership were associated with higher rates of homicide. Our findings held regardless of the following: whether firearm ownership rates were survey-based or derived from a validated proxy, whether states most extreme in ownership rates were excluded from analyses, whether the most and the least populous states were excluded, and whether regressions controlled for rates of poverty, urbanization, unemployment, alcohol consumption, and violent crimes other than homicide. In areas with more firearms, people of all ages were more likely to be murdered, especially with handguns. 
