No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

by Rachel Louise Snyder

It’s a common argument, that if someone wants to kill, he’ll find a way. But eleven of those men said no, they wouldn’t have killed if they hadn’t had access to a gun.7 In a study released in October 2018, the researcher April Zeoli looked at states where anyone served with a restraining order is automatically required to relinquish guns, and found there was a 12% drop in intimate partner homicides, yet only fifteen states required that guns in such instances be turned in.8 Similarly, Zeoli found that in California, where broader restrictions for anyone—including both life partners and dating partners (California calls it closing the “boyfriend loophole”)—convicted of a violent misdemeanor had to relinquish guns, there was an astonishing 23% drop in domestic violence homicides.9 Fifty American women are shot and killed every month by intimate partners; a further untold number are threatened with those guns, kept in line, kept quiet. (And then there are those killed by other methods. Stabbed, strangled, pushed out of moving cars, poisoned.) The United States is the most dangerous developed country in the world for women when it comes to gun violence.10 This is not an issue of partisanship, liberal versus conservative, though I understand many people view it that way; to me it is a moral imperative.