A Mass Shooting Often Starts At Home Against a Woman

A new week, a new mass shooting. Just seven days after a gunman killed eight people in Atlanta, including six women of Korean or Chinese descent, another shooter killed 10 people in a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado. It wasn’t Colorado’s first experience of gun terror: Besides the infamous large-scale shootings at Columbine in 1999 and in Aurora in 2012, on the day after Thanksgiving 2015, a gunman killed three people and wounded nine in a five-hour shooting rampage in a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood.

In fact, Colorado leads all 50 states in the number of mass shootings per capita. Jillian Peterson, professor of criminology at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, has written that Columbine could be the reason why: Other gunmen may have been inspired by the national coverage of the shooting there.

The week between the recent killings in Atlanta and Boulder, there were five other mass shootings that weren’t as widely covered — in Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Stockton, California, and Gresham, Oregon, a sleepy suburb east of Portland. In seven days, the U.S. suffered seven mass shootings.

We don’t know enough yet about any of the seven assassins, but certainly in the past, mass shootings have begun at home, and involve femicide — killing women because they are women. This is a fact you cannot learn from a national database of mass shootings.

In 2012, Adam Lanza, the 26-year old who murdered 26 teachers and elementary school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, started by killing his mother at home. Pearl, Mississippi, offers the 1997 example of Luke Woodham, who at 16 killed his mother at home, then drove to Pearl High School, killed two female students, including his former girlfriend, and injured seven more.

Before Woodham started shooting, he told a friend, “I am not insane; I am angry. I killed because people like me are mistreated every day.” Woodham added that he was “always ridiculed, always beaten, always hated.”

Three years ago, Rachel Louise Snyder, who has covered domestic violence for The New Yorker, published her book, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us. Snyder specifically linked intimate violence in the home to public crimes like mass shootings, gang crimes and rape. She renamed domestic violence “intimate terrorism.”

In the U.S., research continues to show a link between those who commit violence against women and those behind mass shootings. Bloomberg News analyzed 749 mass shootings between 2014 and 2019 and found that  "about 60 percent were either domestic violence attacks or committed by men with histories of domestic violence.” For example, Brookhaven, Mississippi, saw eight people die in a mass shooting in 2017. The perp’s wife had left him because of domestic violence.

For victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, the Violence Against Women Act funds shelters and help all over the country. This year, it is up for reauthorization for the next nine years. After passing the House, VAWA’s reauthorization is facing a fight in the Senate. Gun advocates oppose the new VAWA because it closes “the boyfriend loophole” nationwide.

The loophole meant that while husbands accused of domestic violence had to turn over their firearms, boyfriends and dating partners did not. The new VAWA expands existing prohibitions on gun sales to or possession of firearms by those convicted of domestic violence. This version of the bill aims to close the boyfriend loophole by extending the gun-sale prohibition to those convicted of abusing a former dating partner, even if it’s not someone they lived with or with whom they had a child.

Snyder looked at a 2018 study of states where anyone served with a restraining order must turn in any firearms. (Mississippi is not among these 15 states.) In these states, the study found that femicide was less frequent, a 12% drop. In California, which has become a pioneer in domestic violence prevention since the O.J. Simpson case, there is no boyfriend loophole. There, if convicted of a violent misdemeanor against a woman, life partners and dating partners alike must surrender guns. In October 2018, one epidemiologist found that as a result, there had been a 23% drop in domestic violence homicide.

Snyder writes, “It is surely no coincidence that the states with the highest number of guns per capita also happen to have the highest number of domestic violence homicides, including South Carolina, Tennessee, Nevada, Louisiana, Alaska, Arkansas, Montana, and Missouri.” Mississippi probably ranks among those states, but accurate statistics here are very hard to find. Note that all of these states --and Mississippi --have suffered mass shootings.

After the Boulder mass shooting last week, a young Colorado woman told The New York Times, “Atlanta was a week ago, and now it’s Boulder. What is it going to be two weeks from now? We’re looking at it right in front of us ... and unfortunately that’s just a common experience in America.” Yes, along with domestic violence.

 Ann Marie Cunningham is a Columbia University Lipman Fellow for 2020 who will be working with the Mississippi Center for investigative Reporting. She is a veteran journalist/producer and author of a best-seller. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Technology Review, The Nation and The New Republic. Contact her at amc@mississippicir.org.