Why Female Murder Victims ‘Knowing’ Their Assailant Means Little

If you read my story about the Violence Policy Center’s so-called study, you had to know that sooner or later, the media would get hold of it. While I kind of expected the New York Times or someone to get hold of it and make a thing of it, I still knew someone would if they declined.

And, sure enough, someone has.

There’s this report out of South Carolina, and we need to talk about it.

South Carolina’s rate of women killed by men remained above the national average in 2024, according to a nationwide study highlighted by the South Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (SCCADVASA).

The Violence Policy Center’s “When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 2024 Homicide Data,” released this month, found South Carolina’s rate of female victims killed by males increased to 2.2 per 100,000 in 2024, up from 1.8 in 2023. The national average was 1.4 per 100,000.

According to the report, 62 South Carolina women were killed by men in 2024.

A previous VPC report released in 2023 placed South Carolina among the top 10 states for the rate of females killed by males for 23 out of 25 years from 1996 through 2020.

More than 96% of female victims in South Carolina knew the men who killed them, while nearly 76% were killed with a firearm, the majority of which were handguns.

And this last bit is what made the headline, so let’s talk about this.

The percentages seem accurate enough. However, let’s remember something here, and that’s what the term “knew” means. Here, “knew” simply means it’s someone she knew to some degree. It wasn’t domestic violence, necessarily, though many are. It was just a case of her knowing his name, and he knew hers, and they likely talked from time to time, or had in the past.

Whether they still chatted or interacted at all is irrelevant.

With men, it’s a little different. Roughly 40 percent of male murder victims know their killer, but a large percentage are simply unknown, versus knowing definitively that it was a stranger. 

These numbers aren’t surprising when you recognize that men are four times more likely to be a murder victim than women are. Why? There are a number of reasons, including the machismo honor culture that surrounds gangs and inner-city communities. Women don’t have the same social pressures in such circumstances, so they’re not out killing because they got disrespected.

Further, younger men are more likely to think with their ego, which means someone is less likely to say, “My bad,” when someone gets in their face about some slight. That just ramps up the tensions and makes violence more likely.

Remove things like that, and what you have is that most homicides of both men and women are committed by someone they know.

The issue here is trying to undermine the idea that killing is somehow justifiable or acceptable in any case where your own life wasn’t on the line. If we can erase that from the psyche of certain segments of America, namely your criminal subcultures, we might actually see some far more valuable progress on violent crime.

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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