James Hodgkinson. (photo: Derik Holtmann/AP)
The Link Between Domestic Violence and Mass Shootings
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
19 June 17
Within hours of the shooting of the House Majority Whip, Steve Scalise, and
four others, one couldn't help but feel tired watching the predictable brief
moment of political unity. The country has been through enough horrors to
know that political adversaries will soon line up and take their battle
stations on Twitter and talk shows as no solutions are found and no lessons
are learned. They will blame each other's political ideologies and rhetoric
for the bloodshed. It won't be long until the conspiracy theorists come
along and throw doubt on whether the facts are the facts, or something more
sinister.
No one wants to talk policy reform so soon, but there's one that is
glaringly necessary, and really ought not to be divisive. Wednesday's
shooter, James Hodgkinson, reportedly had a history of domestic violence.
Yet he was able to legally obtain an assault rifle. These two facts are
incompatible with public safety.
The Daily Beast reported, on Wednesday:
In 2006, he was arrested for domestic battery and discharge of a firearm
after he stormed into a neighbor's home where his teenage foster daughter
was visiting with a friend. In a skirmish, he punched his foster daughter's
then 19-year-old friend Aimee Moreland "in the face with a closed fist,"
according to a police report reviewed by The Daily Beast. When Moreland's
boyfriend walked outside of the residence where Moreland and Hodgkinson's
foster daughter were, he allegedly aimed a shotgun at the boyfriend and
later fired one round. The Hodgkinsons later lost custody of that foster
daughter.
"[Hodgkinson] fired a couple of warning shots and then hit my boyfriend with
the butt of the gun," Moreland told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. Hodgkinson
was also "observed throwing" his daughter "around the bedroom," the police
report said. After the girl broke free, Hodgkinson followed and "started
hitting her arms, pulling her hair, and started grabbing her off the bed."
In this, Hodgkinson fits a pattern. As Rebecca Traister has written, for New
York magazine, "what perpetrators of terrorist attacks turn out to often
have in common more than any particular religion or ideology, are histories
of domestic violence." Traister cites Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who drove a
truck through a Bastille Day crowd in Nice, last summer, and Omar Mateen,
the Pulse night-club shooter. She also cites Robert Lewis Dear, who killed
three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, in 2015.
According to Traister, "two of his three ex-wives reportedly accused him of
domestic abuse, and he had been arrested in 1992 for rape and sexual
violence."
Last year, Amanda Taub also wrote powerfully on this issue in the Times.
"Cedric Ford shot 17 people at his Kansas workplace, killing three, only 90
minutes after being served with a restraining order sought by his
ex-girlfriend, who said he had abused her," Taub wrote. "And Man Haron
Monis, who holed up with hostages for 17 hours in a cafe in Sydney,
Australia, in 2014, an episode that left two people dead and four wounded,
had terrorized his ex-wife. He had threatened to harm her if she left him,
and was eventually charged with organizing her murder."
Obviously, not everyone accused of domestic violence becomes a mass shooter.
But it's clear that an alarming number of those who have been accused of
domestic abuse pose serious and often a lethal threats, not just to their
intimate partners but to society at large.
The statistical correlation between domestic violence and mass shootings has
also been documented. As the Times reported:
When Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group, analyzed F.B.I. data on
mass shootings from 2009 to 2015, it found that 57 percent of the cases
included a spouse, former spouse or other family member among the victims -
and that 16 percent of the attackers had previously been charged with
domestic violence.
In the meantime, many domestic-violence suspects, like Hodgkinson, are
arrested only to have the charges dropped later, which leaves them armed and
dangerous. The National Rifle Association and its allies have successfully
argued that a mere arrest on domestic-violence charges-such as Hodgkinson
had-is not sufficient reason to deprive a citizen of his right to bear arms.
After the Sandy Hook massacre, in 2012, an overwhelming majority of
Americans favored tighter gun control, including laws that would require
background checks for gun purchasers to be extended to sales at private gun
shows. Yet a bill proposing that very measure failed to make it through
Congress. And as David Cole, then a law professor and now the legal director
of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote last year, in the New York
Review of Books, the clout of the gun lobby is even greater at the local and
state level, where, after Sandy Hook, eleven states tightened their
gun-control laws but some two dozen made them even looser. The N.R.A., with
its yearly budget of three hundred million dollars, has mastered the dark
art of substituting money for popular will. By spending strategically and
threatening to "primary" any office-holder who deviates from its agenda, it
has managed to impose an extremist agenda that seems almost unchallengeable.
America now has something like eighty-eight guns per hundred citizens-the
highest concentration in the world-yet, inevitably, there will be calls for
more tomorrow.
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