It’s getting to be a familiar routine: within a day or two of a mass shooting or other mass attack, the reports come out that the killer has a history of domestic violence. That’s once again the case with Devin Patrick Kelley, killer in the Texas church shooting. It was also true of James Fields, who drove a car into a crowd of anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. And Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen and congressional baseball shooter James Hodgkinson and Planned Parenthood shooter Robert Lewis Dear. And that’s to say nothing of the routine stories we hear, the shootings in workplaces or businesses that get shrugged off as “just” a domestic incident.
While domestic violence lurks in the background of so many of the men who’ve launched attacks on the public in some way or other, there’s another reason to want to take guns away from men with records of domestic violence: much more frequently than they shoot into nightclubs or churches, they kill their wives and girlfriends and exes and children. But, as Hannah Levintova and Dana Liebelson report in Mother Jones, there are giant loopholes in the laws intended to protect women from their abusers:
Federal law prohibits convicted felons, subjects of permanent domestic-violence protective orders, as well as current and former spouses, parents, and guardians who have been convicted of domestic-violence misdemeanors from possessing a gun. But this leaves many situations where potential abusers are allowed to keep their guns. The current law doesn’t apply to misdemeanant stalkers, domestic-violence misdemeanants who are current or former dating partners but who’ve never cohabitated or had a child together, as well as accused partners subject to a temporary (rather than permanent) restraining order. [...]
Although the marriage rate in the United States declined to a historic low last year, federal law still relies on an antiquated definition of relationships when determining whether alleged domestic abusers should surrender their weapons. People convicted of a domestic-violence offense against partners that they’ve never been married to, cohabitated with, or had a child with are not banned from possessing guns.
This is worrying, especially because dating partners, not spouses, comprise a growing proportion of perpetrators of domestic violence: Between 2003 and 2012, more nonfatal violence was committed against women by a current or former dating partner than a current or former spouse—39 versus 25 percent. And while 69 percent of intimate-partner homicides were committed by a spouse in 1980, compared to 27 percent by dating partners, by 2008 those rates had flipped: 49 percent of intimate-partner homicides were committed by a dating partner, compared to 47 percent by a spouse.
Democrats have introduced three different bills looking to close loopholes by barring abusers from having guns if there’s a temporary restraining order against them, if they’ve been convicted of stalking, and in cases involving partners they haven’t married, lived with, or had a child with. But you can guess the NRA’s position—and therefore the Republican Party’s position—on taking guns away from these abusers.
The vast majority of the men who get to keep their guns despite having abused their wives or girlfriends won’t kill dozens of people in a public place. The majority probably won’t even kill the women in their lives. But is the terror those women will feel knowing that their abusers continue to be legally armed acceptable to the NRA and Republicans? Are the deaths that will absolutely follow acceptable to the NRA and Republicans? They’ve given us a clear answer of yes.