Another Year, Another Bogus Report From Violence Policy Coalition

There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that the correct number of people killed by an intimate partner is zero. However, until humanity improves, I’m afraid all we can hope for is “better than last year.”

And for a group with a name like “Violence Policy Coalition,” you’d expect them to be interested in taking a good, hard look at violence in all its forms, especially in cases where someone is killed by their significant other.

In truth, they only care about violence that involves guns, and they’re really bad at hiding that fact. That’s based on their latest bit of “research” about domestic violence homicides.

Nearly 2,400 females were killed by males in 2024 and of these, 86.9 percent knew their killer. Guns were used in 63.4 percent of the attacks according to the most recent edition of the annual Violence Policy Center (VPC) study When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 2024 Homicide Data.

Each year the VPC releases this report for Domestic Violence Awareness Month in October. The study uses 2024 crime data, the most recent available, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and covers homicides involving one female murder victim and one male offender.

“Lethal violence against women by men is a national crisis with a particularly devastating impact on Black women,” states VPC Government Affairs Director Kristen Rand. “The proliferation of guns only exacerbates the problem, escalating domestic abuse into domestic homicides. This data only confirms the need for effective policies and additional resources to help protect women.”

The thing is, our own John Petrolino dismantled the so-called methodology we see from the VPC back in 2023, and there’s nothing here that actually makes the case that gun control would make anything better.

This time, at least, no one played up the lack of defensive gun uses as they did in 2023, but instead we get stuff like this:

• Nearly nine out of 10 victims (86.9 percent) knew their offenders. Of the victims who knew their offenders, 57.6 percent were wives or other intimate acquaintances of their killers. More than six times as many females were murdered by a male they knew than were killed by male strangers.

Now, for the mathematically disinclined, that means that a total of 50 percent, plus a hair more, were involved intimately with their killer. Simply knowing a man isn’t the same thing as being involved, either, so while they mention the percentages, they’re trusting that you’ll be pulled by the 86.9 number and not that it’s really 50.05 percent.

Then we get this:

• Firearms were the weapons most commonly used by males to murder females in 2024. Nationwide, for homicides in which the weapon used could be identified, 63.4 percent of female victims were shot and killed with a gun. Of the homicides committed with guns, 60.0 percent were killed with handguns. The percentage of females killed by males with a firearm has increased substantially from 51.5 percent in 2011 to 63.4 percent in 2024.

There’s no mention of how these men got the guns, which is interesting.

After all, domestic violence is a disqualifying offense. A conviction on this, even as a misdemeanor, means you’re prohibited from owning a firearm lawfully anywhere in the United States. How many had guns lawfully, then? It seems like something that mattered.

Then, interestingly, the VPC opted not to break down the data by state, something they did before 2023. Why is that? Could it be that anti-gun states and pro-gun states have similar rates, or even that anti-gun states have worse rates? That would be awfully inconvenient, wouldn’t you say?

Look, again, the only correct number of times this happens is zero. That’s not going to change in my view, even if I know it’s completely unrealistic. Still, if you’re going to make the anti-gun case, like VPC always tries to do, you need to show that the problem exists beyond a gun being used for awful things. 

Trying dishonest framing by pretending that half of all women are killed by someone they weren’t intimately involved with just muddies the water here, because it seems pretty clear that these aren’t the same. Further, we also need to understand how people got the gun. Had they been convicted of domestic violence before? Something else?

Honestly, this is just showing an issue and saying, “See! Behold the violence inherent in the system!” like a Monty Python peasant, but with even less reason to scream it.

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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