Within hours of the shooting of the House Majority Whip, Steve Scalise, and
four others, one couldn’t help but feel tired watching the predictable
brief moment of political unity. The country has been through enough
horrors to know that political adversaries will soon line up and take
their battle stations on Twitter and talk shows as no solutions are
found and no lessons are learned. They will blame each other’s political
ideologies and rhetoric for the bloodshed. It won’t be long until the
conspiracy theorists come along and throw doubt on whether the facts are
the facts, or something more sinister.
No one wants to talk policy reform so soon, but there’s one that is
glaringly necessary, and really ought not to be divisive. Wednesday’s
shooter, James Hodgkinson, reportedly had a history of domestic
violence. Yet he was able to legally obtain an assault rifle. These two
facts are incompatible with public safety.
The Daily Beast
reported,
on Wednesday:
In this, Hodgkinson fits a pattern. As Rebecca Traister has
written,
for New York magazine, “what perpetrators of terrorist attacks turn
out to often have in common more than any particular religion or
ideology, are histories of domestic violence.” Traister cites Mohamed
Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who drove a truck through a Bastille Day crowd in
Nice, last summer, and Omar Mateen, the Pulse night-club shooter. She
also cites Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three people at a Planned
Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, in 2015. According to Traister,
“two of his three ex-wives reportedly accused him of domestic abuse, and
he had been arrested in 1992 for rape and sexual violence.”
Last year, Amanda Taub also wrote powerfully on this issue in the
Times. “Cedric Ford shot 17 people at his Kansas workplace, killing
three, only 90 minutes after being served with a restraining
order sought by his ex-girlfriend, who said he had abused her,” Taub
wrote. “And Man Haron Monis, who holed up with hostages for 17 hours in
a cafe in Sydney, Australia, in 2014, an episode that left two people
dead and four wounded, had terrorized his ex-wife. He had threatened to
harm her if she left him, and was eventually charged with organizing her
murder.”
Obviously, not everyone accused of domestic violence becomes a mass
shooter. But it’s clear that an alarming number of those who have been
accused of domestic abuse pose serious and often lethal threats, not
just to their intimate partners but to society at large.
The statistical correlation between domestic violence and mass shootings
has also been documented. As the Times reported:
In the meantime, many domestic-violence suspects, like Hodgkinson, are
arrested only to have the charges dropped later, which leaves them armed
and dangerous. The National Rifle Association and its allies have
successfully argued that a mere arrest on domestic-violence charges—such
as Hodgkinson had—is not sufficient reason to deprive a citizen of his
right to bear arms.
After the Sandy Hook massacre, in 2012, an overwhelming majority of
Americans favored tighter gun control, including laws that would require
background checks for gun purchasers to be extended to sales at private
gun shows. Yet a bill proposing that very measure failed to make it
through Congress. And as David Cole, then a law professor and now the
legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union,
wrote last year, in the New York Review of Books, the clout of the gun lobby
is even greater at the local and state level, where, after Sandy Hook,
eleven states tightened their gun-control laws but some two dozen made
them even looser. The N.R.A., with its yearly budget of three hundred
million dollars, has mastered the dark art of substituting money for
popular will. By spending strategically and threatening to “primary” any
office-holder who deviates from its agenda, it has managed to impose an
extremist agenda that seems almost unchallengeable. America now has
something like eighty-eight guns per hundred citizens—the highest
concentration in the world—yet, inevitably, there will be calls for more tomorrow.