Pike County, Ohio, mass shootings: marijuana grows found at site of execution-style deaths

A shooter or shooters may be at large after killing eight people in “execution-style killings” in several Pike County, Ohio, homes, according to local law enforcement officials.

Here are the details so far, from local news station WHIO, Fox News, and Time magazine:

Authorities said they found three marijuana grow operations at the homes, although they cautioned that they don’t know if the shooting was drug-related. Still, an anonymous official told CNN, “This operation was not for personal use; it was for something much bigger than that. It was a very sophisticated operation.”

Officials said the shooting was preplanned. “This was a preplanned execution of eight individuals,” Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said at a press conference. “It was a sophisticated operation and those who carried it out were trying to do everything they could do to hinder the investigation and their prosecution.”

The shooting is a devastating tragedy, but unfortunately one that Americans are increasingly familiar with. As more of these events end up in the news, the country is being forced to consider why the US, more than any other developed nation, suffers from such extraordinary levels of gun violence. And it seems easy access to firearms provides one answer.

No other developed country in the world has anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as America. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times Sweden’s, and nearly 16 times Germany’s, according to UN data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)

What’s more, there appears to be a correlation between America’s high levels of gun violence and gun ownership, as this chart from Tewksbury Lab shows:

Research reviews by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center have concluded that more gun ownership leads to more gun violence. Other factors, such as socioeconomic issues, contribute to violence, but guns are the one issue that makes America unique relative to other developed countries in comparable socioeconomic circumstances.

Studies have found this at both the state and country level. Take, for instance, this chart, from a 2007 study by Harvard researchers, showing the correlation between statewide firearm homicide victimization rates and household gun ownership after controlling for robbery rates:

A more recent study from 2013, led by a Boston University School of Public Health researcher, reached similar conclusions: After controlling for multiple variables, the study found that a 1 percent increase in gun ownership correlated with a roughly 0.9 percent rise in the firearm homicide rate at the state level.

This holds up around the world. As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained, a breakthrough analysis in the 1990s by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins found that the US does not, contrary to the old conventional wisdom, have more crime in general than other Western industrial nations. Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.

“A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,” Zimring and Hawkins wrote. “A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.”

How can the country address this? The research shows tightening existing gun control measures in the US would help: Studies in both Connecticut and Missouri suggested that gun licensing laws in those states helped reduce homicides and suicides.

But as Harvard’s David Hemenway told Vox’s Dylan Matthews, it would likely take decades for the mild gun control measures proposed in the US to have a significant impact. “It’s all speculation,” Hemenway said. “I suspect it would take a while (decades) for the US to get down to gun violence levels of other developed countries because a) we have so many guns which are durable, and b) we have a gun culture — we tend to use guns more often in more situations than citizens of other developed countries.”

To have a more immediate impact, then, the US would have to find a way to quickly remove the number of guns in circulation. Other countries have actually done that: In Australia, after a 1996 mass shooting, lawmakers passed new restrictions on guns and imposed a mandatory buyback program that essentially confiscated people’s guns, seizing at least 650,000 firearms.

According to one review of the evidence by Harvard researchers, Australia’s firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate fell by 57 percent.

Although it’s hard to gauge how much of this was driven by the buyback program, researchers argue it likely played some role: “First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates.”

Still, similar policies would be difficult to pass in America, a nation in which gun culture and ownership are tremendously ingrained — notably, in the Second Amendment. And gun owners are backed by a powerful lobby: the National Rifle Association. Combined, these forces have stopped any serious gun legislation from passing at the federal level — although some states have passed new restrictions in the past few years.

But given the research, America’s policies and attitudes toward guns have clear, deadly costs — including, perhaps, more events like the Pike County shooting.