Anti-Gun Rhetoric Doesn’t Help With Domestic Violence Tragedies

I’m far from an expert statistician, but I’ve learned a few things over the years about how people use and abuse statistics in order to make their political point.

There are a lot of ways you can make a mild thing look absolutely horrific, all by presenting the statistics a certain way. In the Second Amendment debate, we see this a lot.

And, well, we’re going to see it again, this time as domestic violence prevention advocates try to misrepresent the statistics to push for gun control.

Roughly 19 women are killed with a firearm in domestic violence homicide-suicides each month, according to a new report released Thursday from Everytown for Gun Safety shared exclusively with The 19th.

“When we look at the public discourse on gun violence or on gun violence prevention, it tends to surround very public mass shootings,” said Sonali Rajan, senior director of research at the gun violence prevention nonprofit that advocates for gun control. The type of violence covered in the new report is a “conflation of two public health and public safety crises” — intimate partner violence and suicide.

Ninety-nine percent of incidents in the report, which looks at data from 2014 to 2020, involved a man shooting a woman. Men make up 87 percent of suicides by firearm in the United States.

So, they’re citing Everytown–a gun control organization that has a well-documented history of shady research–as if they’re absolutely unbiased and are just reporting their neutral findings.

However, let’s continue for a second. We’ll come back to this in a moment, but there are some other things I want to quote first.

“Firearms make it five times more likely that an abuser will kill their female partner,” Rajan said. Access to a gun also increases the likelihood of death by suicide because of impulsivity and the lethality of firearms.

Nearly 5,500 women were killed by an intimate partner across seven years of data, according to Everytown. In a third of those instances, the abuser then killed themselves and 85 percent of those dual tragedies involved a firearm. The figure is likely underrepresented due to uneven state-by-state data collection. It also doesn’t include women who were injured by their partner’s firearm, or threatened with one.

Now, all of that sounds awful because it’s awful. No one is disputing this in the least.

But perspective matters. It’s vitally important that we understand the context of these numbers, rather than being terrified simply because they’re big numbers. The exact number, according to Everytown, is 5,450 over those seven years. That’s roughly 779 per year. Of these, Everytown claims 85 percent involved the woman being shot to death, or about 662 incidents per year.

That is pretty awful, no doubt about it.

However, when you’re looking at about 13,000 to 16,000 firearm-related homicides, we can start to see that maybe the problem here is being amplified well beyond its actual scope.

Also, this study, last updated in 2023, found that there are roughly 5 million acts of intimate partner violence in the United States against women, with 1.5 million of those being severe, such as sexual assault or actual physical assaults, as opposed to grabbing, slapping, etc, which the study terms as being somewhat minor.

In other words, the odds of a battered woman being shot to death are actually pretty low. It’s not zero, so I’m not saying we should accept that, but this study also found that there’s been a 60 percent drop in intimate partner violence, though I couldn’t find over what timeframe they were looking at.

Through all of this, though, the goal is obvious. It’s Everytown’s study, after all. It’s about gun control.

Yet, the question is, just what gun control are they pushing for?

One tool Everytown points to that can help prevent such crimes is an Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO), which confiscates firearms from someone deemed to be an immediate threat to themselves or others.

A study of Oregon’s ERPO law found such orders were most frequently issued against someone at risk of suicide — important because 1 in 4 members of Everytown’s focus group said perpetrators of intimate partner homicide-suicide had a history of suicidal behaviors.

The problem with this argument is…well, there are a lot of problems.

First, people with domestic violence charges can’t lawfully buy guns under the current laws. So, that should be ample gun control in and of itself, but it’s not. Part of that is that battered partners are reluctant to report their abuse.

However, the fact that even Everytown acknowledges at least some of these women are murdered by their partners without a firearm present, shouldn’t they be advocating for women to get a domestic violence protective order instead? That already keeps people under such orders from lawfully owning guns, but it also gives women an outlet to call the police if the abusive partner shows up at all.

A red flag order won’t do that. It just takes the guns and otherwise leaves the abuser alone.

But they’ve already set the stage. They’ve provided scary but misleading statistics to make it look like the problem is both an epidemic and one that can only be solved by restricting guns in some way, such as a policy that Everytown treats like the answer to all of society’s ills. They argue that such laws can stop everything from mass shootings to more pedestrian acts of violence, with everything else in between, such as these horrific crimes.

But the truth is that the problem here, as elsewhere, is that there are violent people who will hurt and kill those they claim to love. We need to focus on that, including helping women find it within themselves to report abusive partners in the first place.

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

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