A new study has found that a higher rate of firearm ownership is associated with a higher rate of domestic violence homicide in the United States, but that the same does not hold true for other kinds of gun homicide.
That means that women, who make up most victims of domestic homicide, are among those most at risk, said Aaron Kivisto, an associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Indianapolis and the lead author on the study.
“It is women, in particular, who are bearing the burden of this increased gun ownership,” he said.
The study, published Monday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, examined firearm ownership on a state-by-state level from 1990 to 2016. It found that while firearm ownership was associated with rates of gun homicide involving intimate partners and other family members, there was no significant association between gun ownership rates and the rates of other kinds of gun homicide, such as those involving friends, acquaintances and strangers.
“That was probably the most surprising finding,” Kivisto said.
“It is not a risk that is equally shared across the population,” he added.
The study reaffirms a well-known connection between access to guns and abusive relationships turning deadly, at a time when intimate partner homicides are on the rise. Research has shown that women killed by their partners are more likely to be killed with a firearm than by all other means combined, and the presence of a gun in domestic violence situations can increase the risk of homicide for women by as much as 500 percent, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
Both men and women were at increased risk for domestic homicide when firearm ownership increased, the study found. “But the important caveat to that is, whereas men are victims in about 3 out of 4 typical homicides that occur, it fully reverses when we are talking about intimate partner homicide,” Kivisto said. “Women are 3 in 4 victims of intimate partner homicide.”
Other research has found an association between firearm ownership and homicide rates overall, but when Kivisto and a team of researchers parsed out the relationship between victim and offender, they found no association between the rates of gun ownership and nondomestic firearm homicides.
One possibility for the finding, the researchers hypothesised, is that perpetrators in nondomestic homicides are more likely to obtain their weapons illegally, or to buy a weapon legally shortly before the crime.
“These might not be gun owners as we tend to think of them, but gun obtainers,” Kivisto said.
The study estimated firearm ownership by state by looking at the ratio of firearm suicides to total suicides, as well as state hunting license data. The combination has been shown to have a strong correlation with older survey data on gun ownership from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Kivisto said. The rate of estimated firearm ownership varied widely, ranging from about 10 percent in Hawaii to 69 percent in Wyoming, with an average ownership rate of 39 percent.
States with the highest firearm ownership had a 65 percent higher incidence rate of domestic firearm homicide compared to states with lower ownership rates.
The National Rifle Association, which recently opposed efforts to expand law enforcement’s ability to restrict gun purchases by convicted domestic abusers, criticized the study for failing to consider certain factors that contribute to violence.
“The study fails to include factors that organizations like the FBI recognise as contributing to violent crime,” Lars Dalseide, a spokesman for the NRA, said in a statement Monday. “State funding of law enforcement and social services should be the most relevant factors considered when addressing domestic violence and this study fails to control for either.”
The NRA also pointed to research that suggests that most gun crime is committed by those who possess guns illegally.
The study comes as gun deaths overall are on the rise.
In 2017, there were 39,773 gun deaths in the United States, according to data from the CDC. When adjusted for population size, it was the highest rate of firearm deaths since the mid-1990s. Nearly two-thirds of the deaths were suicides.
A recent study found that intimate partner homicides are also on the rise, fueled primarily by gun violence. In 2017, 926 of 1,527 women killed by partners were killed with guns, the study found. Overall, gun-related domestic killings increased by 26 percent from 2010 to 2017.
The most recent study did not take into account state gun laws, which have been an emphasis of gun-control activists in the wake of mass shootings.
These kinds of public shootings, which loom large in the national consciousness, account for only a small percentage of gun deaths. But in an analysis of shootings with four or more victims from 2009 to 2017, Everytown for Gun Safety, an organisation that works to reduce gun violence, chronicled a connection in domestic violence: In at least 54 percent of shootings in which four or more people were killed, the perpetrator also shot a current or former intimate partner or family member.
A number of states have enacted laws to limit access to guns among people who have been convicted of domestic violence or are the subject of a protective order, and Kivisto said the study’s findings underscored the importance of those laws.
“Guns are a real risk factor,” he said.
