The
National Institute of Justice (NIJ) has defined familicide as a case in which one intimate partner murders the other and their children before committing suicide.
Common characteristics of murder-suicide in families include:
- Prior history of domestic violence.
- Access to a gun.
- Threats, especially increased threats with increased specificity.
- Prior history of poor mental health or substance abuse, especially alcohol.
...
In 591 murder-suicides, 92 percent were committed with a gun. States with less restrictive gun control laws have as much as eight times the rate of murder-suicides as those with the most restrictive gun control laws.
Compared to Canada, the United States has three times more familicide; compared to Britain, eight times more; and compared to Australia, 15 times more.
Currently, there is no national database of murder-suicides in the United States, but the
Violence Policy Center (VPC) has been collecting and analyzing news reports of them since 2002. Their latest report, "
American Roulette: Murder-Suicide in the United States," covers the six-month period between January 1, 2011 and June 30, 2011 and reveals that there were twelve murder-suicides each week. Of the 313 events that they examined, 89.5 percent involved a firearm. Extrapolating their six-month survey into a year, they estimate that there were 1,382 murder-suicide deaths in 2011, which puts it squarely in the 1,000 to 1,500 annual deaths estimated by medical studies. Of all murder-suicides in the six month study 72 percent involved an intimate partner. In 94 percent of those cases, women were killed by their partners.
The study authors write:
The most common catalytic component in murder-suicide is the use of a firearm. Firearms allow shooters to act on impulse. Every major murder-suicide study ever conducted has shown that a firearm—with its unmatched combination of high lethality and easy availability—is the weapon most often used to murder the victims, with the offenders then turning the gun on themselves.
According to the
American Psychological Association:
74 percent of all murder-suicides involved an intimate partner (spouse, common-law spouse, ex-spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend). Of these, 96 percent were women killed by their intimate partners.
A group of researchers studied the Danger Assessment Test to see if it could help identify women who were at risk of being murdered by their intimate partners. The
Journal of the NIJ published a report titled "
Assessing Risk Factors for Intimate Partner Homicide." From the report:
Women are killed by intimate partners—husbands, lovers, ex-husbands, or ex-lovers— more often than by any other category of killer. Homicide of women is a leading cause of death in the United States among young African American women aged 15 to 45 years. [The preceding sentence was revised March 11, 2014.] Intimate partner homicides make up 40 to 50 percent of all murders of women in the United States, according to city- or State-specific data-bases (as opposed to the Federal Supplementary Homicide Reports). Significantly, the Federal report doesn’t have an ex-boyfriend/ex-girlfriend category, which accounts for as much as 11 percent of intimate partner homicides of women and for 2 to 3 percent of intimate partner homicides committed by women.
In 70 to 80 percent of intimate partner homicides, no matter which partner was killed, the man physically abused the woman before the murder.
They also found that:
...women who were threatened or assaulted with a gun or other weapon were 20 times more likely than other women to be murdered. Women whose partners threatened them with murder were 15 times more likely than other women to be killed. When a gun was in the house, an abused woman was 6 times more likely than other abused women to be killed.
In 2010, the NIJ held a seminar titled
Men Who Murder Their Families: What the Research Tells Us. As part of the panel discussion, Jacquelyn C. Campbell, Anna D. Wolf Chair and professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Nursing ...
... discussed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Violent Death Reporting System. Of the 408 homicide-suicide cases, most perpetrators were men (91 percent) and most used a gun (88 percent). A 12-city study that Campbell conducted of these cases found that intimate-partner violence had previously occurred in 70 percent of them. Interestingly, only 25 percent of prior domestic violence appeared in the arrest records, according to Campbell. Researchers uncovered much of the prior domestic violence through interviews with family and friends of the homicide victims. "Prior domestic violence is by far the number-one risk factor in these cases," Campbell said.
She also explained that most people who commit murder-suicide are non-Hispanic white males who kill their mates or former mates. Prior domestic violence is the greatest risk factor in these cases. Access to a gun is a significant risk factor, as are threats with a weapon, a stepchild in the home or estrangement. However, a past criminal history is not a reliable or significant predictor in murder-suicide.
Campbell also "found that unemployment was a significant risk factor for murder-suicide but only when combined with a history of domestic violence."
David Adams, author of Why Do They Kill? Men Who Murder Their Intimate Partners was also a member of the panel:
When we consider prevention, guns are essentially the "low-hanging fruit," he suggested. He cited research, similar to Campbell's data, showing that 92 percent of murder-suicides involved a gun in a sample of 591 cases.
Adams compared high rates of intimate-partner homicide in the United States with the considerably lower rates in other wealthy countries. He noted that America has the most permissive gun laws of any industrialized nation. He made a similar comparison among U.S. states that have restrictive versus permissive gun laws and lower versus higher homicide and suicide rates. Three reasons guns are used frequently is that they are more efficient than other weapons, can be used impulsively, and can be used to terrorize and threaten.
In August of this year Adam Lankford, criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama and author of
The Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive Killers, presented his research on mass shootings to the American Sociological Association. After studying incidents of public mass shootings in 171 countries, he concluded that what drives a nation's rate of mass murders is the availability of guns.
In an interview with Scott Timberg of Salon, he was asked if curbing the supply of handguns could limit mass shootings. His response:
I do know that in Australia, there was a terrible mass shooting, in which 35 people were killed. They immediately enacted major gun control, reduced the number of firearms in the country by 20 percent, and they haven’t had a public mass shooting since. That’s one case where there seems to be a cause-effect in a positive direction.
Another part of that evidence, from my study, is that the top-five countries by gun ownership rate – the United States, Yemen, Switzerland, Finland, and Serbia – are all ranked in the top 15 for public mass shootings per capita. The data show that if you have a lot of firearms, you’re going to have a problem. There seems to be a direct link.
The latest public mass shooting in the United States has led to yet further discussion of universal background checks on all gun purchases. Universal background checks would prevent the sale of weapons to criminals and to those who have mental issues that would make firearms possession unsafe. But we all know that the National Rifle Association is not going to let that happen. After the children were murdered in Newtown, the entire nation was talking about background checks and all agreed that it was time to take action. The NRA disagreed. No action was taken.
Now, the mere mention of background checks leads to accusations of wanting to ban guns. And liberals as well as progressives immediately back off, claiming that no one is talking about banning guns.
Well maybe it is time we did.
Maybe it is time we started talking about banning handguns. Let them keep the long guns and shotguns so that they can kill Bambi, Bullwinkle, Bugs and Tweety. But unless there is some very compelling reason, such as a federally registered competitive target shooter, there should be no civilian ownership of handguns. The only purpose of a handgun is homicide.
We have long regulated civilian ownership of classes of weapons, from machine guns to rocket launchers and hand grenades. Let us stop trying to beg the NRA for crumbs from their table and start ordering regulations from a menu that might save lives, just like they did in Australia.
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