Jun 02, 2017
June 2 is National Gun Violence Awareness Day. While gun control advocates across the country try to bring attention to the issue of mass shootings, it’s critically important for us also not to lose sight of the fact that hundreds of American women are likely to be killed by their armed partners each year. These murders can often be the catalyst for the numerous mass shootings that take place in public as well.
“We as Americans think that we are safer in the United States from violence, terrorism and other dangers,” said Allison Anderman, the managing attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “But I wonder if American women know that we are 16 times more likely to be shot and killed by our counterparts in other countries.”
In April, the nation was reminded of this deadly statistic when Cedric Anderson went into the San Bernardino, California elementary school where his wife, Karen Smith (who was black), worked and shot and killed her, an 8-year-old student and then, himself. Though they’d only been married for a short time and Karen had recently left her husband. This tragedy also highlights the ways in which violence (while not limited to race, class and gender) disproportionately impacts black women. Sadly, Smith’s death at the hands of an intimate partner is not unusual.
African-American women only make up about 13 percent of U.S. women, but comprise about half of female homicide victims — the majority of whom were killed by current or former boyfriends or husbands.
According to Justice Bureau statistics, African-American women are victimized by domestic violence at rates about 35 percent higher than white women.
“Black women are really impacted around violence as a whole, where we’re talking about domestic violence, trafficking, or sexual violence,” [said Tiffany Turner-Allen, program director at UJIMA, the National Center on Violence in the Black Community]. “The numbers skew very high.”
Part of what remains problematic about the link between domestic violence and guns is that there is a disconnect between state and federal laws. Those convicted of domestic violence charges are banned at the federal level from owning a gun. But at the state level, it’s a completely different story.
35 states don’t have a full ban on misdemeanor offenders, according to gun-control groups, creating something of a headache for local prosecutors. […]
Domestic violence charges are often talked down to a misdemeanor offense, or the charges are dropped if a witness doesn’t speak.
And yet statistics show that banning domestic violence offenders from buying guns does, in fact, work. In cities where offenders are banned from buying or possessing guns, the rate of intimate partner homicide (IPH) is lower (25 percent) than states that do not have such a ban. As a society, we have struggled with coming to terms with the nature of domestic abuse. There are plenty of ways abusers are protected and incentivized to harm others. And we most certainly cannot get a grip on our obsession with guns. But the facts are simple. When domestic abusers have access to firearms in the home, they are more likely to kill their partner. Five times as likely, in fact. We live in a society that continuously devalues women so it feels unlikely that these statistics will make a difference, especially when so many black women, in particular, get killed by their partners. But it is imperative that we raise this issue as a part of the gun control conversation.