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Everytown for Gun Safety Releases New Report on Guns and Domestic Violence

October 17, 2019

The Report Demonstrates the Disproportionate Impact Gun-Related Intimate Partner Violence Has on Women of Color 

NEW YORK – Everytown for Gun Safety, the country’s largest gun violence prevention organization, today released Guns and Intimate Partner Violence: America’s Uniquely Lethal Intimate Partner Violence Problem, a report analyzing intimate partner violence in the United States, particularly the disproportionate impact it has on Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Hispanic women.

The report presents policy solutions such as strengthening state laws that disarm domestic abusers, closing loopholes in federal law that leave guns in the hands of abusive partners and stalkers and improving implementation of existing laws. 

“An astonishing amount of the trauma, injury and death of women and children in the US today can be traced to domestic violence — and when guns are involved, all three become more deadly,” said Sarah Burd-Sharps, Everytown’s research director. “But when we know what a problem looks like and who it affects the most, we can learn how to solve it. The research clearly shows we can make our country safer for women and children if policymakers take the necessary steps to disarm domestic abusers.”

“I live every day with the pain of what happened to me because my abuser had a gun,” said La’Shea Cretain, a member of the Everytown Survivor Network whose ex-boyfriend shot her five times in front of her young children in 1996. “Every statistic in this report is also a story — my story, and the story of other survivors of intimate partner violence. Lawmakers have the power to change those stories with proven policies that limit domestic abusers’ access to guns.”

The full report is available here and includes toplines addressing the way gun-related intimate partner violence impacts marginalized communities such as:

  • About 4.5 million women in the US today report having been threatened with a gun by an intimate partner. 
  • In at least 54 percent of mass shootings — incidents in which four or more people are shot and killed, excluding the shooter — the perpetrator shot a current or former intimate partner or family member. 
  • Between 2009 and 2018, 80 percent of child victims of mass shootings died in incidents connected to domestic or family violence. 
  • Black, American Indian/Alaska Native and Hispanic women are victims of homicide at the highest rates, and over 55 percent of these killings are committed by an intimate partner. In more than half of those deaths, a firearm is involved. 
  • Black women are twice as likely to be fatally shot by an intimate partner, and younger Black women—between the ages of 18 and 34—are nearly three times more likely to be shot and killed by an intimate partner than their white counterparts. 

To produce Guns and Intimate Partner Violence, Everytown examined data from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other sources, and consulted with leading researchers, practitioners and experts in the field of intimate partner violence, to provide insight into the scope of gun-related intimate partner violence in the U.S.  

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