Deadliest Mass Shootings Are Often Preceded by Violence at Home
An analysis of 749 mass shootings over the past six years found that about 60% were either domestic violence attacks or committed by men with histories of domestic violence.
One afternoon in January 2016, Tina Long-Gray showed up at her brother Tony’s office. She seemed anxious, “different somehow,” Tony Long recalled in a phone call. They went for a walk, and Tina started crying, confessing to him that her marriage of 18 years wasn’t what it seemed. She told him she sometimes woke up to her husband Andre choking her, showing him the marks around her neck. “Fresh bruises,” he said.
She had a plan to leave and had already purchased a house, but she worried that Andre was going to kill her. “She made me promise that I would take care of her kids,” Tony said. “She kept repeating, ‘promise me, promise me, promise me.’”
Two weeks later—the night before Tina planned to move into her new home—Andre Gray took her gun from a safe and shot her in front of their two children. He then shot both of them and killed himself. As Amber, their daughter, lay bleeding from her stomach, she realized that he had unplugged all the phones in the house to keep them from calling for help. After a two week stay in the hospital, she’d later learn he’d locked the garage door, too. “If we had tried to leave that night, we wouldn’t have been able to get out,” she said.
Before coronavirus lockdowns, domestic violence-related mass shootings like the one that killed Tina were among the most common in the U.S. Between 2014 and 2019, almost 60% of shooting incidents with four or more casualties involved an aggressor with a history of—or in the act of—domestic violence, an analysis by Bloomberg News found. This is a troubling statistic made even more so during a pandemic that has people spending more time at home and buying more guns.
Shootings committed by domestic abusers aren’t only routine, they’re among the deadliest. The higher the casualty count, the more likely the perpetrator was reported to have had a history of domestic violence or violence against women, Bloomberg’s analysis found. In shootings with no fatalities, only 15% of aggressors had records of beating, harassment or other acts of brutality at home. In those with six or more deaths, that number shot up to 70%.
The deadlier the shooting, the more likely the gunman had a history of domestic violence
Shootings that ended in...
By most metrics, reports of domestic violence have been on the rise. Since states started shutting down across the U.S., more than 80% of the cities and counties reporting data have seen a significant uptick in domestic violence calls to hotlines or police, according to data published by the Marshall Project. Meanwhile, the FBI conducted a record 3.7 million background checks in March, with 2.6 million representing firearm sales, an 85% increase from March 2019, according to estimates from Small Arms Analytics, which tracks the gun industry. And while mass shootings took a 24% dip in April, when compared to the same month last year, the number of reported domestic-violence related high casualty events held steady.
With the concurrence of the lockdown orders, rising unemployment and skyrocketing gun sales, experts worry that there’s a perfect storm brewing—one that remains largely invisible to the public eye. Jan Langbein, the chief executive officer of Genesis Women’s Shelter in Dallas, has not seen a notable increase in calls to the hotline over the past few months, which she interprets as a potentially even more worrying sign. She suspects victims are too scared to get help while quarantining with their abusers. “They may not be able to call for help now,” she said. “But we think when the all clear siren sounds, it’ll be a tsunami.”
After the most horrific mass shootings, a shooter’s violent history with women often shows up as a biographical footnote. After Omar Mateen killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016, news reports noted that he beat and strangled his ex-wife throughout their marriage. Elliot Rodger drove around a college town shooting people in 2014 after writing a 137-page manifesto in which he described an ideal world where all women would be “quarantined in concentration camps and deliberately starved to death.” Devin P. Kelley, who murdered 26 people in a Texas church in 2017, had a documented history of choking, attacking, sexually assaulting and threatening to kill his ex-wives.
Given the apparent connection between domestic violence and mass shootings, keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers could be the key to stopping some of the country’s most fatal events. But instead, inconsistencies in the country’s current laws—and gaps where none exist—leave a victim’s safety to an arbitrary dice roll of factors like geography, bureaucratic attitude and luck.
While most high-casualty shootings are either committed in the act of domestic violence or by someone with a history of it, most abuse at home doesn’t usually lead to murder. But mass shootings committed by abusers usually aren’t isolated, unpredictable incidents, said Robert Spitzer, a political science professor at the State University of New York at Cortland who studies gun control laws. “There are intermediate steps between hitting a spouse and committing a mass shooting, and often they are ignored,” he said. “Violence begets violence—it’s a mindset, an activity that feeds on itself.”
Amber Gray, now 22, remembers growing up against a vivid backdrop of violence. From a young age, she witnessed her father spit on her mother, drag her by her hair and slap her across the face so hard Tina went deaf in one ear. But she never imagined that the abuse would culminate in her mother’s death, she said. “After it all happened, I questioned myself, why didn’t I ever think this might happen?” she said. “When it was at its worst, I was so small. And she had just dealt with it for so long.”
A vast majority of offenders are men: Women carried out less than 3% of mass shootings over the six-year period in Bloomberg’s analysis. Some acted with their male partners, like the couple that murdered 16 people and injured 22 others in San Bernardino in 2015. On the rare occasion that a woman acted alone, she had often been the victim of abuse, like when Nilda Sheffield shot her daughter, two grandchildren and herself in 2018 to “free” them from her daughter’s abusive boyfriend, according to a journal police found in the residence.
Men Committed More Than 97% of Shootings
- Committed by men alone
- Committed by women alone
- Committed by at least one man and at least one woman
Some legislation has attempted to address the link between domestic violence and mass shootings. But enforcement is spotty and loopholes abound.
The Lautenberg Amendment, which became federal law in 1996, bans the possession of firearms by people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors. But because of what’s known as the “boyfriend loophole” it’s still legal for abusive dating partners, boyfriends or girlfriends to own guns. Only 18 states and Washington, D.C. prohibit someone convicted of abusing a non-married partner from owning guns.
The “Charleston loophole” enables licensed gun dealers to sell firearms before a required background check on buyers has been completed, which is how Dylann Roof acquired a gun to kill nine people at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015. And if someone really wants to acquire a gun, they only have to find a private, unregulated seller at a gun show or online.
Because of his criminal record and history of abuse, Jody Lee Hunt was prohibited from owning a firearm, but he bought a handgun through Facebook. About a year later, in 2014, he used it to kill four people, including his ex-girlfriend, who had filed multiple restraining orders against him.
Even when authorities have information that a gun owner presents a threat, they often can’t—or choose not to—act. Prior to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead, the FBI had received a tip about the gunman’s “desire to kill people and erratic behavior” but failed to follow through with appropriate protocols to stop the attack. Thirty-one states lack “red flag laws,” which permit courts to order the removal of firearms from people they deem “presently dangerous.” Almost all of the states that have them, including Florida, passed theirs after the Marjory Stoneman shooting.
States With Red Flag Laws See Fewer Shootings
- No red flag laws
- Red flag laws
Source: Giffords Law Center; Bloomberg analysis
Another problem is getting convicted abusers to give up guns they already own. A 2015 article in the Duke Journal of Gender and Law Policy called the Lautenberg Amendment “egregiously ineffective.” Each year, out of the hundreds of thousands of convicted domestic abusers with guns, only about 50 are charged with violating the gun ban, the paper found.
Local authorities often don’t enforce the Lautenberg Amendment and its state equivalents, said Shelli Egger, a domestic violence attorney with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. “I’ve had a client whose abuser had a bullet with her name literally written on it. The judge at trial didn’t ask the offender to give up his guns or ammunition.”
Even when judges require abusers to relinquish their firearms, there can be a lack of clarity about what to do next, said Jeana Lungwitz, the director of the domestic violence clinic at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. “They just say you can’t possess firearms. But what are they supposed to do with them? Give them to their brother? Give them to their dad?”
In 2008, Sonja Holt stood in front of a judge in civil court and recounted an incident in which her abusive fiance of 11 years, Stafford Shaw, played “Russian Roulette” with her, firing a bullet at her as she ran out of the bedroom. He would repeatedly pin her to the ground and put the gun in her face, threatening to kill her, she said. He was sentenced to 90 days in prison and sent to a batterer’s intervention program. No one said anything about his gun, she said in a recent phone interview, not even her attorney. He went on to murder his next girlfriend, their infant child, two bystanders and himself in 2015.
Some counties have gun surrender programs for domestic abuse offenders, but many rely on honor systems where abusers have to voluntarily give up their firearms. Their efficacy is spotty, at best. Dallas County’s program, which began in 2015, collected just 116 guns in three years, over 2,000 guns short of its goal. Most gun surrender programs in the U.S. suffer from similar inadequacies, resulting in a patchy system where the majority of victims fall through the cracks.
King County in Washington has had more success, but its program has more teeth. A state bill passed in 2017 allowed the sheriff’s office to launch a domestic violence task force with the power to seize guns from violators. In 2018, the county confiscated almost 600 guns, four times more than in 2016.
Guns Surrendered in King County
Guns Surrendered in Dallas County
Stephanie Bond had been married to her husband Gabriel Omo-Osagie for 22 years when he began to grow increasingly abusive in 2009, she said. That year, he was arrested for domestic battery and under Illinois state law no longer had the right to own firearms. But the police refused to take his 80 guns, saying it was “nothing more than a dirty divorce,” Bond said. According to a court filing, one officer told her that she was “only crying wolf;” another told her husband they had “better things to do” than enforce the law against him. Three months later, in February 2010, her husband shot her three times and killed himself.
Stephanie survived after losing two-thirds of the blood in her body. A year later, she filed a lawsuit against Illinois state and local police for failing to enforce the law. She lost the case.
Any attempt to update laws or close loopholes has, like most gun control legislation, stalled in Congress. Last year, the House of Representatives passed two bills to close the “boyfriend loophole” and require universal background checks for anyone buying a gun, no matter where. The Republican-controlled Senate blocked the first bill and left the second to gather dust. In 2017, Representative Mike Quigley, a Democrat from Illinois, introduced a bill mandating a federal study to explore whether domestic violence is a reliable indicator for mass shootings. It, too, went nowhere.
Egger, the lawyer at Legal Aid, says partisanship is the main issue. “The longstanding attitude has been that we avoid the liability of upsetting the gun rights lobby, when the real liability is human life,” she says. “And women are dying because of it.”
It was thanks to a jammed handgun that Amber Gray and her little brother both survived the shooting in 2016. Tony and his wife took them in after the incident, just as he’d promised Tina he would.
After the shooting that night, unopened items Tina had purchased for her new house—kitchen utensils, bathroom accessories—laid packed and labeled in the family room for her move the next day. The house went back on the market.