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Countries with lower gun ownership are safer than those with higher gun ownership, a new study suggests.

Researchers said the latest finding debunks the popular notion that guns make a country safer.

The study looked at the data from 27 developed countries to find possible links between gun ownership rates, mental illness and the risk of firearm-related death.

While many in the U.S. believe that guns make a nation safer, researchers said there has been little evidence supporting their belief.  Researchers said some of the recent shootings in the U.S. like Aurora, Tucson, Oak Creek, at Virginia Tech, have revealed that there may be a relationship between mental illness and easy access to guns.  Researchers in the study say that lack of treatment for mental illness may be more of a problem than availability of guns.

 After examining data from 27 developed countries, researchers found that gun ownership rate was a strong and independent predictor of firearm-related death.

"Private gun ownership was highest in the US. Japan, on the other end, had an extremely low gun ownership rate. Similarly, South Africa (9.4 per 100,000) and the US (10.2 per 100,000) had extremely high firearm-related deaths, whereas the United Kingdom (0.25 per 100,000) had an extremely low rate of firearm-related deaths," researcher Sripal Bangalore, MD, MHA, of NYU Langone Medical Center, said in a news release.

The latest study found a strong correlation between guns per head per country and the rate of firearm-related deaths, with Japan being on one end of the spectrum and the U.S. being on the other.

"This argues against the notion of more guns translating into less crime. South Africa was the only outlier in that the observed firearms-related death rate was several times higher than expected from gun ownership," Bangalore said.

The study also looked at whether mental illness, and not merely the access to guns, is the driving force for criminal activities. However, researchers found no significant correlation between mental illness and crime rate.

"Although correlation is not the same as causation, it seems conceivable that abundant gun availability facilitates firearm-related deaths. Conversely, high crime rates may instigate widespread anxiety and fear, thereby motivating people to arm themselves and give rise to increased gun ownership, which, in turn, increases availability. The resulting vicious cycle could, bit by bit, lead to the polarized status that is now the case with the US," researchers write in the study.

"Regardless of exact cause and effect, the current study debunks the widely quoted hypothesis that countries with higher gun ownership are safer than those with low gun ownership," they concluded.

The findings are published in The American Journal of Medicine.