The Loophole That Lets Abusers Keep Their Guns

It's no secret that our country's gun laws are riddled with loopholes, but one is killing women specifically.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, murders linked to domestic violence have risen dramatically, up 58% in the last decade. Guns are the most common weapon abusers use to kill their partners, and victims are usually women. And many of these perpetrators are not even allowed to have guns in the first place.

Under federal law, people convicted of a felony, a domestic violence misdemeanor, or who are subject to family violence protection orders are not allowed to have guns. But these laws usually are not enforced, and intimate partners pay the ultimate price. Federal gun laws and the vast majority of state statutes have a glaring loophole: they don't address how to keep guns away from people who aren't supposed to have them, nor do they create the legal infrastructure to keep victims, their families, and their communities safe from violent offenders. Instead, around most of the country, these gun laws are enforced on an honor system that puts the onus on people who are prohibited from possessing firearms to disarm themselves, with virtually no follow-through to ensure that they've done so. Often prosecutors don't even go after these offenders once they know they're in violation of the law; even more often, law enforcement doesn't realize the perpetrator illegally possessed a firearm until it's too late. 

Jennifer Gollan, an award-winning reporter for Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, has spent over a year investigating and reporting on a series called When Abusers Keep Their Guns. From 2017 through 2020, Jennifer identified at least 110 intimate partners who were killed by offenders who were barred from having guns under federal and, in some cases, state law. This is certainly an undercount, as the federal government does not track the number of people prohibited from possessing firearms who go on to kill their intimate partners. 

Jennifer is on the podcast to dive into where the gaps are in the enforcement of these gun laws and how we can close them. We discuss both federal and state solutions to enact this common-sense gun reform.

LINKS:

Transcript of the podcast

Read the centerpiece of the investigation, Armed and Abusive: How America's Gun Laws Are Failing Domestic Violence Victims

Read the story, which Reveal published in partnership with The Guardian: How America's Gun Laws Are Failing Domestic Violence Victims 

Listen to the Reveal podcast: When Abusers Keep Their Guns

Watch the documentary, produced in collaboration with Al Jazeera English's "Fault Lines": Unrelinquished

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