Nearly 25 percent of intimate partner homicide-suicides committed with a firearm were perpetrated by those who were prohibited from owning a gun, according to a focus group analysis by Everytown for Gun Safety released Thursday.
Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group, conducted focus groups with 43 survivors of intimate partner homicide-suicide, a crime that occurs more than daily in the U.S. According to the reports of the survivors, almost one in four of the perpetrators “were prohibited by law from possessing a firearm.”
The report said that the prohibition reasons included being under a domestic violence restraining order, being convicted of a felony or misdemeanor domestic violence crime or having specific mental health histories.
The report noted that Everytown “has not independently confirmed the prohibited status of the perpetrators.”
One of the survivor’s accounts, whose sister and nephew were the victims of a murder-suicide, said that the perpetrator “wasn’t supposed to have a gun due to being a convicted felon,” according to the report.
“But I was later informed by one of my sister’s friends that he had multiple guns and actually held her and the kids as hostages a few weeks before the shooting incident,” the survivor said.
The report also found that children were witnesses in 43 percent of the incidents reported in the focus groups and were killed in 16 percent of them.
Nearly one-third of survivors said the gun used in the murder-suicide was “easily accessible and stored unsecured,” such as being stored on the nightstand, under the mattress or in the car.
The study noted that more than once a day in the United States, a person kills an intimate partner before dying by suicide themselves, according to data from the Violence Policy Center. About nine in 10 of these incidents involved a firearm, according to the data.
