Michael Bloomberg’s advocacy group, Everytown for Gun Safety, recently completed an analysis that found a strong connection between mass shootings and domestic violence. Everytown’s report looked at mass shootings dating between January 2009 and and July 2014. The group used the FBI’s definition of a mass shooting: “any incident where at least four people were murdered with a gun.”
Their analysis found that in that five and a half year period, “at least 57% of mass shootings surveyed were related to domestic or family violence.” The group estimates that 51% of the victims of mass shootings are women.
Sadly the link between mass shootings and domestic violence might not be that surprising, as the Huffington Post notes, women in abusive relationships are far more likely to be killed if their abuser owns a gun.
Kim Gandy, president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, told the Huffington Post:
“It’s clear that many of these murders were committed by people already barred from gun ownership by federal law — but that law is full of loopholes, like background checks not being required for private sales, like Craigslist or at gun shows,” she said. “It’s shocking that the gun lobby has succeeded in blocking such common-sense solutions, and that there aren’t more members of Congress standing up on the issue.”
Everytown also found that mass shooters are generally older than “perpetrators of gun violence in the U.S. as a whole,” averaging between 30 and 34 years old.
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