Firearms and Family Violence

The United States Supreme Court has restricted the rights of women when it comes to control of their bodies and reproduction. The same court has expanded the rights of people when it comes to access to guns. This mixture is particularly deadly for pregnant women: The Journal of the American Academy of Surgeons found that “increasing rates of peripartum homicide occur in states that are restrictive to abortion access.” (The study defines peripartum as “currently pregnant or within 1-year postpartum.”)

In The New England Journal of Medicine, Elizabeth Tobin-Tyler reminds us that “the majority of intimate partner violence-related homicides involve firearms.” Tobin-Tyler notes that “one in three women in the United States experiences contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner (or a combination of these) at some point,” and she points out that SCOTUS’s 2022 Bruen decision in particular, which struck down state limits on who may carry firearms in public, has “important repercussions for people in abusive relationships”—repercussions duly noted in the dissents to Bruen’s majority.

Public health experts Alexandria Goodyear, Michael Rodriguez, and Deborah Glik examine in detail how firearms and intimate partner violence (IPV) result in ”greater morbidity and mortality” for women. The problem is particularly acute in the US, which has high rates of both firearm ownership and IPV. Of the twenty-five countries they surveyed, the authors found that the US had 32 percent of the female population but “84 percent of all female firearm homicides.”

As it turns out, homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the US. A Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health study found that American “women who are pregnant or who have recently given birth are more likely to be murdered than to die from obstetric causes.” They’re not being killed by random strangers—the threat typically hypothesized by fear-mongers. Instead, two-thirds of these killings occur in the home, and most of these murders involve firearms.

Law professor and domestic violence center director Jane K. Stoever deals with the repercussions of domestic abuse client by client. Stoever notes that “home safety” is typically given as the reason for gun-ownership, but “firearm ownership dramatically increases rates of firearm fatalities and suicide for members of the household, even with safe gun storage practices.” The abuse victims she sees are often terrorized by armed partners.

Patriarchy tolerates—even, it could be argued, is based on—femicide, the zero-sum result of misogyny, but domestic violence is also at the root of many gun massacres. Men who first threaten or abuse women often kill their partners along with the strangers they massacre in their mass-shooting. Writes Stoever on hearing of yet another mass-shooting,

as someone who has spent my life working on gender-based violence issues, I wait for the likely news that there was a history of domestic violence. We see this again and again: the Seal Beach salon massacre, and mass shootings at San Bernardino Elementary School; Pulse nightclub; congressional baseball practice; the Sutherland Springs, Texas, church; Parkland, Florida, and Dayton, Ohio.

Stoever argues the “part of what makes firearm violence and these tragedies so heartbreaking is that they are preventable.” It’s still possible to prevent someone with a restraining order or convicted of domestic violence from legally obtaining a gun. But the nation is awash in guns, while untraceable “ghost gun” DIY kits are now one of the fastest growing gun safety problems.

Meanwhile, the political problem remains: the nation is held hostage by the lobby and marketing of the gun industry, backed by its supporting voters. As the research shows, legislation that sanctions both the policing of women and minimal policing of guns means that IPV—firearm violence within the household—is unlikely to end soon.

Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.

The post Firearms and Family Violence appeared first on JSTOR Daily.