The Honorable Donna F Edwards
Domestic Violence and the Need for Universal Background Checks
July 5, 2016
Mr/Mrs Speaker, years before coming to Congress, I was a cofounder and served as the Executive Director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV). We worked with several organizations to ensure the enactment of the domestic violence offender gun ban that became law in 1996. As a country, we have made progress in preventing such violence, but with several mack truck sized loopholes, there remains quite a lot more we can do to protect individuals at risk.
Leaving an abusive relationship is the most dangerous time for a domestic violence victim and adding a firearm to that situation severely heightens their risk of injury or death.
In America, the majority of fatal domestic violence is committed with firearms.
- At least 52 percent of American women murdered with guns are killed by intimate partners or family members.
Despite impressions from media coverage, mass shootings in which at least four people are murdered with a gun are also typically acts of domestic or family violence: an Everytown analysis of every mass shooting between 2009-15 found that 57 percent were committed by intimate partners or family of the victims.
But research shows that common-sense gun laws have a marked effect on improving women’s safety from gun violence. In states that require background checks for all handgun sales, 46 percent fewer women are murdered with a gun by an intimate partner.
And state laws ensuring that convicted abusers or those subject to domestic violence restraining orders are separated from their firearms are also associated with reductions in gun violence against women.
But because of loopholes in these laws and failures to enforce them, they do too little to curb the uniquely lethal American problem of guns and violence against women. Four gaps in the law are particularly harmful:
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First, federal law does nothing to keep guns out of the hands of abusive dating partners or convicted stalkers. The federal laws prohibiting domestic abusers from buying or owning guns do not apply to dangerous people convicted of misdemeanor stalking offenses or to dating partners—even though more women in the U.S. are killed by their dating partners than by their spouses.
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Second, in thirty-five states, state law does not prohibit all people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence crimes and all people subject to restraining orders from buying or using guns. So while domestic abusers in those states cannot possess guns under federal law, local law enforcement and prosecutors do not have the tools they need to enforce those restrictions.
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Third, federal law (and the law in most states) allows domestic abusers and stalkers to easily evade gun prohibitions by purchasing guns from unlicensed, private sellers. Federal law only requires background checks for gun sales at licensed dealers. Sixteen states require checks on all handgun sales, but in the remaining states, prohibited abusers seeking to avoid a background check have little trouble purchasing a gun from an unlicensed seller they meet online or at a gun show. Prohibited domestic abusers are well aware of this loophole—and have taken advantage of it to deadly effect. In a first-of-its-kind investigation of illegal online gun sales, Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that 1 in 4 prohibited purchasers seeking guns online had a domestic violence arrest.
- Finally, forty-one states do not require all prohibited domestic abusers to relinquish guns they already own. Without a clear law on the books that provides an enforceable process by which offenders relinquish their firearms, it is too easy for dangerous abusers to keep their guns even after they commit offenses that prohibit them from having firearms.
That is why I have joined Reps. Gwen Moore and Robin Kelly to reintroduce HR 3813, the Domestic Violence Gun Homicide Prevention Act, to spur states to strengthen protections for domestic violence victims at risk of gun violence.
We also know that a proven way to help people who are not eligible to purchase guns such as felons and domestic abusers is to expand and strengthen universal background checks on all firearms sales. That is why I am a cosponsor of H.R. 1217, the Public Safety and Second Amendment Rights Protection Act of 2015, and H.R. 2380, the Gun Show Loophole Closing Act of 2015, both of which would close the so-called gun show loophole.
Tragically, our lax gun laws make it easier for abusers to acquire a firearm than it is to purchase a box of Sudafed. Working together, we can and must change that fact and help reduce the nine American women shot and killed by their husbands and intimate partners every single week.
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