Domestic Violence and Guns

In his latest attempt to drum up support for his largely rejected theories about community safety, Micheal Bloomberg has started Every Town for Gun Safety. Domestic Violence and guns is the latest rallying cry and just like his other anti-gun organizations; Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Moms Demand Action, the Bloomberg funded Every Town for Gun Safety is already fabricating statistics in an attempt to perpetuate their emotional appeal that guns are bad. This time they have enlisted the help of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords who co-authored an article published by CNN titled Guns Killing Women : Time for Congress to Act.

Congresswoman Gifford, regardless of what you think of her politics, was nearly killed because she chose to serve the nation. Jared Loughner (a paranoid Schizophrenic) attacked congresswoman Giffords, shooting her and 17 other people, six of whom died in 2011. She was shot in the head at close range and was both strong, and lucky enough to survive. Congresswoman Giffords has lost significant vision in both eyes, and has trouble speaking. She officially resigned from congress in January 2012 vowing to return. She and her husband subsequently jointly published Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope.

More recently she Katie Ray Jones published the opinion piece referenced above. Every sentence from the article that we reference below can be found practically verbatim in Every Town for Gun Safety’s “Study” on guns and domestic violence, and of course, none of the statistics are sourced. Unfortunately, Mrs. Giffords and Mrs. Ray-Jones have relied on these “facts” in their article supporting gun control as a means of protecting women. Unfortunately, these Every Town for Gun Safety “facts” are grossly misleading, and in some cases outright falsehoods.

Lets take a look at a few of these statements:

“Women in America are 11 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than women in other democratic countries with developed economies.”

While I have no doubt that there is a subset of countries that you can select to get to a metric of “11 times more likely”, why would you exclude the rest of the population from the study? Perhaps Every Town for Gun Safety considers women from non-democratic countries less worthy of protection… Perhaps poor women from undeveloped nations are unworthy of consideration… Or could it be that their statistical inclusion destroys your gun related violence theory. Regardless, here is where American Women rank in the global homicide statistics.

According to the UNODC 2013 Study on Homicide, females are the victims of 21 percent of the total homicides in the world. According the U.S. Department of Justice Homicide trends in the United States, females are the victim of 23.2 percent of the total homicides in America.

The global firearms related homicide rate is approximately 4.723 per 100,000 people. That number is difficult to calculate due to inconsistent data tracking, gaps in reporting and the assumptions and exclusions necessary to create average the appropriate rates. I used all available data from the UNODC from 2003 – 2010, averaged the year over year rates by county, and then took the average rate based on the largest set of data available.
According to the UNODC, in 2011, the U.S. Firearms related homicide rate is 3.2 / 100,000.

Globally the rate for female firearm related homicide is 0.992 per 100,000. For American Women, it is .736 per 100,000. Those are what the statistics tell us is true and the fact is that American women are 26 percent less likely to be involved in a firearm related homicide than their global counterparts. I have no idea what selective data set you chose in an attempt to make the statement “11 times more likely”, but that is an outright fabrication.

“If an abuser has access to a gun it increases the chance that a woman will die by 500 percent.”

While I will not attempt to contest the fact that when a person chooses to kill someone, they will choose the most effective tool available to them. What I question is does gun access actually result in 5 fold increase in female domestic abuse deaths?

Here is what the U. S. Department of Justice had to say when they released their Report titled Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980 – 2008 This section and these graphs depict the results of domestic violence related homicides by weapon use.



What we see from the above graphs is that the use of firearms in domestic violence related incidents are in fact lower than the use of firearms in stranger related homicides by about 20 percent. The use of other weapons is what makes up the difference. The facts tell us that firearms are actually less prevalent in domestic violence incidents than in the other homicides that occur in society. A bit further down you see that gun use in domestic violence in America is in fact declining, but on the first graph you can see downward trend in gun use.

“Most of the time, women are murdered with guns by someone they know, either by a family member or an intimate partner, such as a former or current husband or boyfriend.”

When we look the U.S. Department of Justice, we see that the facts show us that in 78.1 percent of all homicides, the victim and offender know each other. As we see above in the case of domestic violence; weapon use and guns specifically are less prevalent in domestic abuse homicide than in stranger homicides.
Nothing in that statement is patently untrue. Abuser access is an un quantifiable number. The reality is that the data shows us that guns are irrelevant in the equation. That sentence is designed solely to give the impression that domestic violence and guns are somehow linked.

What we see here on the left is that the use of firearms in domestic violence incidents have declined significantly in the past 30 years.

“Between 2001 and 2012, more women were shot to death by an intimate partner in our country than the total number of American troops killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.”

I have no idea how the ability of American Medics to save the lives of critically wounded service members fighting an enemy of our nation has any parallel or comparison to the behavior of cowardly males who take out their inadequacies on their wives and partners. I am proud of the American Servicemen and Women who were fortunate enough to return, and I am proud of the American medics and doctors who enabled that to occur. If we use survival metrics from any other war prior to the Gulf War, we would not come close to those numbers. When you choose to attempt to advance your ill informed opinions, I would appreciate if you would refrain from dancing on the graves of my fellow soldiers who did not return in the process of lying to your countrymen.

“Currently, federal law prevents people who are under domestic violence protection orders or have misdemeanor domestic violence convictions from accessing guns. But even though increasing numbers of couples are choosing to marry later in life, the law hasn’t been extended to address dating partner abuse.”

The Laughtenburg Act which prevents persons convicted or subject to domestic violence restraining orders from handling firearms (to include military service members on active duty) does not limit the restriction to a spouse, or domestic partner. Anyone subject to a domestic violence restraining order is not allowed to access, purchase or posses firearms. The law they are claiming needs to be enacted, not only exists, it has existed since 1997.

If we are to make progress on the issue of community safety, we need to look at the world as it exists, not as we wish it to be. Mr. Bloomberg has decided to spend his vast fortunes attempting to ban guns from society because he has convinced himself they are somehow detrimental to society. Unfortunately he is flat out wrong. This latest attempt to push domestic violence as the emotional basis for this argument is in fact counter productive to women’s safety.

When we look at England and Australia, the most commonly touted gun control success myths, we see increased violent crime, no impact on total homicide or suicide, and that women bear the brunt of those ill-conceived decisions. Most egregious are the rape rates in these westernized nations where women have no legal means of defending themselves from sexual assault by a physically more capable aggressor.

These types of wholesale fabrications we just went over are right in line with any of the organizations that Mr. Bloomberg funds. You can read about John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s fabrication of numbers here. If you want to know more about the truth of what is at the base of the gun control argument, check out this brief introduction to the topic below. Do some research and you’ll see that guns have no correlation with violence, domestic or otherwise, unless you choose to study “Gun Violence”, in which case you have identified your culprit before you started to study the problem…

While Mr. Bloomberg is spending millions to couch his ill-informed opinions as credible research, there are many productive research based attempts to reduce the violence in our society. Criminals, mental health, gangs and a cultural glorification of violence are real problems, which we as a society can impact. Guns are currently a symptom that has the nation distracted from addressing the underlying causes of violence in our society.
Stay informed and stay safe!

 

About Author

 

Patrick Henry - President & Firearms Instructor at Aegis Academy

 

Patrick Henry received his operational training and experience from the U. S. Government, 22 years of which were spent in the Marine Corps where he served in the Reconnaissance, Infantry and Intelligence fields. During his active service, he spent more then seven years deployed overseas in combat, operational and training assignments. After the military, Pat worked as a contractor and as the Director of Operations at a private paramilitary company, specializing in training special operations forces and providing protective services to select private clients. His education consists of an MBA from the University of Southern California (USC), and a BS from San Diego State University with an emphasis in Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology and a minor in Psychology. He holds an extensive list of security and training related certifications from a variety of government and nationally recognized entities. He currently sits on the advisory committee at USC’s Master of Veterans Business Program, and is an active member of Infraguard and the American Society of Industrial Security (ASIS). He has been a guest speaker at ASIS, the San Diego Industrial Security Awareness Council and other private organizations on physical security, travel security, and competitive intelligence collection counter-measures.

First Published at Aegis Academy