Vox reporter Hope Reese has a Q/A with a political science professor and author of several books on gun policy, Robert Spitzer of State University of New York Cortland. The whole interview is worth a read, but as you might imagine, Spitzer, who wrote The Politics of Gun Control, drew a direct link between people who perpetrate mass shootings and a history of domestic violence. From the man who shot at congressional Republicans practicing baseball, James T. Hodgkinson, to the mass murderer at the Pulse nightclub, Omar Mateen, to the man who terrorized a Planned Parenthood, Robert Lewis Dear, domestic violence is a thread that often links mass shooters.
Here’s a taste of the interview:
Hope Reese
Is a history of domestic violence the greatest common characteristic among mass shooters, beyond political motivations or other variables?
Robert Spitzer
Statistically, yes. They simply don't receive the same degree of attention.
When you look at the 11,000 or 12,000 murders last year, what proportion of them involved people who knew each other? In a majority of murders, the perpetrator and the victim knew each other. They were relatives, neighbors, friends. Within the subset of the perpetrator knowing the victim, how many of them were domestic-related? I'll hazard a guess that the majority of them are.
[Author’s note: Spitzer is correct: according to Angela Stroud, author of Good Guys With Guns, "between 1980 and 2008, 41.5 percent of murdered women were killed by a current or former husband or boyfriend, 30 percent were killed by an acquaintance, and 16.7 percent were killed by a family member."]
Tying personal relationships not only to mass shooting but to murder generally, and to interpersonal violence, it plays a huge role.
You can read the entire interview here.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2tykV3D
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