When domestic violence offenders are required to relinquish their guns, instead of simply being barred from owning firearms, the risk that those offenders may kill their partners goes down, a new study finds.
The paper, described in the Annals of Internal Medicine, highlights a simple method for lowering the risk women face of being killed by an intimate partner: Enforce the laws already in place.
Each year, the study authors point out, more than 1,800 people are killed by their intimate partners — current or former spouses or people they dated, for example. About half of those killings are carried out with a gun.
Roughly 85 percent of those victims are women. In fact, nearly half of the women killed in the U.S. each year are killed not by a stranger, but by an intimate partner.
Firearms play a significant role in these domestic violence homicides — a pattern that the law has tried to address for decades. The 1994 Violence Against Women Act banned gun ownership for people with permanent restraining orders because of intimate-partner violence, or IPV. And a 1968 law banning gun ownership for those with an IPV-related felony was extended to include misdemeanors in 1996.
The federal law has a loophole: While offenders are not allowed to own a gun, they aren’t explicitly compelled by the law to give up any guns they already have.
Recently, some states have begun to change those laws, putting in additional requirements that IPV offenders relinquish their firearms.
But do any of the policies in this state-by-state patchwork quilt of gun legislation actually work? It’s been hard to tell because there hasn’t been much research on the effectiveness of different gun laws, said senior author Michael Siegel, an epidemiologist at the Boston University School of Public Health.
For this study, Siegel and his colleagues decided to use this patchwork of policies as a natural experiment. They compared the intimate-partner homicide rates from 1991 to 2015 for each state, using the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports database. They looked at which states simply banned gun possession for people under IPV-related restraining orders, and which ones went a step further and required those people to actively turn in their firearms.
In states that simply banned gun possession, the gun-related intimate-partner homicide rate did not drop by a statistically significant amount. But in those that required offenders to surrender their guns, that rate dropped by a full 14 percent.
This drove the overall intimate-partner homicide rate down by 9.7 percent — which indicated that the laws really did seem to have a significant effect.
