Mass Shootings & The Silent Scourge of Domestic Violence
When will we start paying attention to the violence that takes place behind closed doors?
Rep. Steve Scalise, the third ranking member of House Republican leadership, was among five people hospitalized Wednesday after a gunman opened fire on a baseball field in Alexandria, VA. While we don’t know the motives of the shooter, who was identified as 66-year-old James Hodgkinson of Belleville, Illinois, we do know that the incident fits into a startling yet often overlooked pattern of mass shootings committed by gunmen with a history of domestic violence.
Hodgkinson, armed with at least two firearms, approached the ballfield where congressional Republicans were holding practice Wednesday morning and fired off over 50 rounds before being critically wounded by police. But the victims in Alexandria were not his first.
Described as “a man prone to aggressive outbursts,” Hodgkinson was arrested in 2006 after allegedly punching his daughter’s friend in the face, pulling a shotgun on the young woman’s boyfriend, and choking his daughter. According to police reports from his home state of Illinois, the young woman told police that Hodgkinson had forced his way into the home while looking for his daughter, who locked herself in a room and hid behind a bed.
Hodgkinson then “forced open the door and began to beat her, pull hair out of her head, and try to pull her out of the room,” NBC News reported, citing a police report from the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Department. After the two girls ran out of the house and tried to escape in a car, Hodgkinson “pried open a car door and used a knife to slice the seat belt apart,” then began choking his daughter as she held onto the steering wheel. When the friend said she was calling the police, Hodgkinson punched her in the face before fleeing the scene.
Hodgkinson was charged on two counts of domestic battery, two counts of battery, aggravated discharge of a firearm, and criminal damage to a motor vehicle, according to NBC News. The state ultimately took custody away from Hodgkinson, but the criminal charges were dropped — meaning that he could still legally purchase a firearm.
For those of us who study violence prevention, this pattern is all-too-familiar. While mass shootings are complex and can rarely (if ever) be a attributed to a single causal factor, domestic violence is very often a thread that weaves these seemingly “random” incidents together. Addressing domestic violence as an underlying risk factor would not only help reduce the risk of mass shootings, but could also save the lives of women who so often become victims in these incidents.
The Mass Shooting-Domestic Violence Link: Different Manifestations of the Same Problem
The link between domestic violence and mass shootings can manifest in a variety of different ways. Often, the shooter has a history of domestic violence, much like Hodgkinson. In other cases, domestic violence incidents carry over into acts of public mass violence. And in some cases, simmering resentment and hatred towards women boils over into mass gender-based violence. Of course, these scenarios commonly overlap, as men with histories of domestic violence often perpetrate future domestic violence, and many also identify with belief systems — such as hostile sexism — that are strongly associated with violence against women.
Consider the cases below, which exemplify the different manifestations of the connection between domestic violence and mass shootings.
Domestic violence as a harbinger of more severe violence to come
Esteban Santiago, the alleged assailant in a January 2017 mass shooting that left five people dead at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, had previously been prosecuted for physically assaulting his girlfriend. According to the Daily Beast, Santiago was charged for an incident in which he struck his girlfriend in the head and strangled her after breaking down a bathroom door to get to her.
Omar Mateen, the gunman who killed 49 people and injured 53 others at Orlando’s Pulse night club in June 2016, had a years-long history of spousal abuse, including physically abusing his wife for not finishing household chores. A former co-worker, Daniel Gilroy, said Mateen was also incredibly misogynistic and racist, and had a temper that was “scary in a concerning way.” “He did not like women at all,” Gilroy told NBC News. “He did like women in a sexual way, but he did not respect them.”
“He did not like women at all. He did like women in a sexual way, but he did not respect them.”
John Russell Houser, who murdered two women and injured nine others in a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, before turning the gun on himself, also had an extensive history of domestic and family violence.
Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three people and injured nine others when he opened fire at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic in 2015, had been arrested for rape and accused of domestic violence by two of his ex-wives.
Two years before killing 32 people in the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, gunman Seung-Hui Cho had been investigated for stalking two female classmates.
Domestic violence incidents that spiral into public mass shootings
Just over 2 weeks ago, Willie Cory Godbolt, a Mississippi man with a history of domestic violence, was arrested after a domestic dispute “spiraled into a killing spree that left eight people dead at three separate homes.” Less than a year earlier, Godbolt’s wife had accused him of “choking and punching her, and putting his hand down her mouth so she couldn’t scream.” Years before that, Godbolt’s own mother shot his father to death after suffering abuse. Witnessing abuse as a child is another common characteristic among perpetrators of mass shootings.
In April, Cedric Anderson walked into a special-needs classroom at an elementary school in San Bernardino, California and opened fire, killing his wife and an 8-year-old student, and leaving another 9-year-old student seriously wounded, before turning the gun on himself. According to San Bernardino police, Anderson had a history of domestic violence and was angered by his wife’s recent decision to leave him.
In February 2016, Cedric Ford went on a shooting rampage that left three people death and 14 injured in a Kansas lawnmower factory. According to law enforcement, Ford had been served with a restraining order just 90 minutes before the attack. The protection order was filed by his live-in girlfriend, who described an incident in which Ford put her in a choke hold, pushed her to the ground, and choked her. Authorities said the protection order may have triggered Ford to take out his rage on his coworkers at the factory.
Nearly 75% of intimate partner homicide victims are killed during or right after the process of leaving their abuser.
These incidents highlight a tragic bind that many abused women find themselves in: The risk of being murdered by an abusive partner is highest when a woman is attempting to leave or end the relationship. Nearly three out of four victims of intimate partner homicide are killed during or right after the process of leaving their abuser, and a third of homicide victims with a temporary restraining order are murdered within a month of getting the order.
Resentment and hatred of women leading to acts of mass gender-based violence
Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in a 2014 shooting rampage in Isla Vista, California, left behind a disturbing manifesto describing his “burning hatred for all women who rejected me through the years.” Rodger, who was deeply involved in the so-called ‘men’s rights movement,’ viewed feminism as an “oppressive system” and repeatedly issued a call to arms to start a “revolution against women and feminism.” In a chilling video recorded just hours before going on his deadly shooting rampage, Rodger described his plans to exact revenge for being rejected by women: “You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t you know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you for it,” Rodger said. “If I can’t have you, girls, I will destroy you.” Rodger expressed similar sentiments in a 106,000-word manifesto, which he sent to news outlets in advance of his shooting spree. “I cannot kill every single female on earth,” he wrote, “but I can deliver a devastating blow that will strike all of them to the core of their wicked hearts.”
“If I can’t have you, girls, I will destroy you.” — Isla Vista gunman Elliot Rodger
Five years earlier, in August 2009, George Sodini walked into an aerobics class at a Pittsburgh gym and opened fire, killing three women and wounding nine before turning the gun on himself. Police later discovered that Sodini had left behind an online diary as well as a series of notes in which he detailed his hatred and resentment towards women. In a note found in Sodini’s gym bag at the scene of the shooting, “he complain[ed] he had never spent a weekend with a woman, never vacationed with a woman and never lived with a woman, and that he had had limited sexual experiences,” CNN reported. “He made similar complaints in his online blog, which also document[ed] his growing rage at women for rejecting him and at the world he felt had abandoned him.” Sodini’s writings led authorities to conclude that he was specifically targeting women when he planned his rampage.
Three years before that, in the fall of 2006, two separate school shootings targeting young girls took place within the span of just one week. In the first incident, 53-year-old Duane Morrison took six girls hostage at a Colorado high school and sexually assaulted them before killing one of them and then himself. Morrison left behind a 14-page letter, which police said described his intent to “kill the young ladies and then kill himself.” Less than a week later, gunman Charles Carl Roberts IV entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse, allowed the male students to leave, and then proceeded to line the female students up against the chalkboard and shoot at twelve of execution style before turning the gun on himself. Law enforcement said Roberts didn’t seem to have a grudge against the Amish or this particular school; rather, the police commissioner said, “it seems as though he wanted to attack young female victims.” It was later reported that Roberts had a history of sexual abuse, including molesting his own young relatives two decades earlier.
Perhaps the most notorious case in this category is the 1989 Montreal Massacre, in which 25-year-old Marc Lépine shot 28 people and himself at Montreal’s École Polytechnique, claiming he was “fighting feminism” and wanted to stop women from “seizing [the advantages] accorded to men.” Before opening fire, Lépine told a group of women: “You’re women, you’re going to be engineers. You’re all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists.” He expressed similar sentiments in his suicide note, writing: “I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker.” In a span of just under 20 minutes, Lépine killed fourteen women, injured ten other women and four men, and then turned the gun on himself.
Beyond Anecdotal Accounts: The Data on Guns & Domestic Violence
The incidents described above provide descriptive anecdotal accounts of the overlap between different forms of violence, yet they barely scratch the surface of the daily mass shootings in the United States. However, the link between violence against women, domestic violence, and mass shootings is borne out in the data from several nationwide analyses of mass shootings.
Over half of mass shootings in the U.S. are directly related to domestic violence…
According to one recent analysis by Everytown for Gun Safety, more than half (54%) of mass shootings between 2009 and 2016 were directly related to domestic or family violence, meaning that a current intimate partner or family member was one of the victims in the shooting. The New York Times found similar results in a 2015 analysis of mass shooting victims. In 57 percent of mass shootings that year, the victims included a current or former intimate partner or family member of the attacker, and in many cases, the victims included both partners and family members — most commonly, children. A third analysis of mass shootings from 2009–2015 turned up nearly identical findings, with intimate partners and/or family members targeted as victims in 57% of the incidents. Women and children accounted for a disproportionate 64% of mass shooting victims during that time-period, a finding that reflects their overrepresentation among victims of mass shootings (in comparison, women make up 15% of total gun homicide victims, and children make up only 7% of total gun homicide victims). Overall, adult women comprised a slightly greater proportion of mass shooting victims (37%) than adult men (36%) (the other 27% of victims were children). However, when looking only at domestic violence-related mass shootings (i.e., those that targeted a partner or family member), women made up 39% of victims, while men made up just 19%. A staggering 42% of victims in domestic violence-related mass shootings were children.
Even when domestic violence does not play a direct role in mass shootings, gunmen are often found to have a history of domestic violence and abuse of women. Nearly half (42%) of the shootings in the Everytown analysis were carried out by shooters who had at least one warning sign of future violence — and more often than not, this included violence and/or threats of violence against a family member or intimate partner.
While more research is needed to systematically examine domestic violence as a risk factor or predictor of mass shootings, there is already an expansive body of literature documenting the devastating and often fatal overlap between gun violence and domestic violence. As Everytown writes in their analysis, “the connection between mass shootings and domestic violence may be explained, in part, by the role guns play in domestic violence generally.”
Guns kill more female victims of intimate partner homicide than all other weapons combined…
Among all female gun homicide victims, about two-thirds are killed by a current or former intimate partner, and over 90% are killed by a male they know (e.g., a current/former partner, family member, or friend). Nearly three women are murdered by current or former intimate partners every day in the U.S., and the vast majority of these murders are carried out with a firearm. In fact, guns kill more female victims of intimate partner violence than all other weapons combined. Abused women who live in homes with a firearm are six to eight times more likely than other female victims to be killed by their partners. During domestic disputes, the presence of a firearm increases a woman’s risk of being killed by an estimated 500%. Weapons are also an incredibly strong predictor of repeat abuse for women in violent relationships. According to a 2014 analysis, women are up to 83% more likely to experience repeat abuse by their male partners if a weapon is used in the initial abuse incident.
The best predictor of future violence is past violence…
This pattern shouldn’t come as a surprise: researchers have long known that the best predictor of future violence is past violence. However, domestic violence is often viewed as a different type of violence — one that we, as a society, don’t take as seriously. Because it happens behind closed doors, domestic violence is typically perceived as a private or personal problem, rather than a public health or safety issue. This, in turn, influences public perceptions of responsibility for preventing domestic violence, shifting the focus towards the individual actors and largely absolving society of our responsibility.
The media has a role in changing this perception. One of the most enduring findings in the literature examining media reports of domestic and intimate partner violence is that coverage is highly skewed towards event-based reporting (or “episodic framing”). In other words, coverage focuses primarily on discrete events or incidents of domestic violence while largely ignoring the overarching societal context in which domestic violence occurs and is perpetuated.
The way the media presents domestic violence has an impact on public perceptions of the problem, which in turn influences support (or lack of support) for public health, criminal justice, and other governmental policies designed to address domestic violence. Framing domestic violence as a series of isolated, random events not only skews perceptions of personal risk, but also tends to elicit individualistic rather than societal attributions of responsibility for preventing domestic violence. It also means the connection to other types of violence, including mass shootings, is often overlooked — and ultimately, that leads to missed opportunities to save lives through changes to laws and policies, community initiatives, and criminal justice responses.
While we can’t prevent every mass shooting or stop every savage act of domestic violence, there are concrete steps we can take to reduce the carnage. For example, domestic abusers can exploit current state laws that do not require a federal background check before every gun sale, including sales by unlicensed, private sellers. But in states that have closed this loophole by requiring a background check for every gun sale, 38% fewer women are shot to death by intimate partners. Similarly, cities in states that restrict access to firearms for those under domestic violence protective orders see a 25% reduction in intimate partner gun homicides.
Given the connection between domestic violence and mass shootings, reducing the bloodshed in our society will ultimately hinge upon reducing the daily violence that takes place inside so many American homes — and recognizing that we all have a role to play in doing so.
