When you picture Gun Violence, what do you think about? Does a student bringing a gun to school concealed in his or her backpack or waist line come to mind? Do you think about someone waving a gun around while trying to rob a gas station?
What you might find truly surprising – and even a little scary – about gun violence is that it is really more of a woman’s issue based on statistics. Despite this new revelation that gun violence is mostly a women’s issue, that doesn’t make it any less important for everyone to be educated and aware of the issue.
But for now, let’s take a closer look at why some believe this is a female’s problem.
Women in domestic violence situations
If you watch Investigation Discovery or really any TV show or film that covers murder/crime investigations, you'll see a lot of it involves women being killed by their current or former partners. It’s a sad truth that police often look to the significant other as the primary suspect when someone is killed. Often, crimes of passion happen in an instant and there’s nothing the woman – or a man – can do to protect themselves from what is to come.
Research conducted by The Huffington Post reveals 80 percent of people killed every year in the United States by their partners are women.
To put that number in perspective the media outlet goes on to clarify, that's out of the 760 who die this way yearly, 53 percent of those murders involve a gun.
Laws don’t really protect women
You Gov notes that only 65 percent of people support keeping firearms away from people who have had restraining orders against them in the past.
That means someone who has stalked a woman can still possess a gun. There are 41 states that don't ban people who have domestic violence on their records to give up the guns they have even though they are no longer allowed to buy them, according to a report by Every Town Research. The report also reveals that in 35 states those convicted in a domestic violence case can still purchase a gun.
These Numbers make it very easy for someone who wanted to hurt a woman – or man – in the past from getting a gun to easily do it again.
Now, it is understandable for a person to still not really understand why gun violence is a woman’s issue. After all, a gun is a problem for anyone. But, the people touched the most by gun violence are women. Statistically, there is a woman in the U.S. who is shot by his/her current or former love interest every 16 hours in the United States, FBI crime data analyzed by the Associated Press reveals. These numbers are terrifying and all it would take is a few law changes to help bring them down. Were you aware of gun violence being something that impacted women more than men?