Roughly 19 women are killed with a firearm in domestic violence homicide-suicides each month, according to a new report released Thursday from Everytown for Gun Safety shared exclusively with The 19th. 

“When we look at the public discourse on gun violence or on gun violence prevention, it tends to surround very public mass shootings,” said Sonali Rajan, senior director of research at the gun violence prevention nonprofit that advocates for gun control. The type of violence covered in the new report is a “conflation of two public health and public safety crises” — intimate partner violence and suicide. 

Ninety-nine percent of incidents in the report, which looks at data from 2014 to 2020, involved a man shooting a woman. Men make up 87 percent of suicides by firearm in the United States. 

“Firearms make it five times more likely that an abuser will kill their female partner,” Rajan said. Access to a gun also increases the likelihood of death by suicide because of impulsivity and the lethality of firearms.

Nearly 5,500 women were killed by an intimate partner across seven years of data, according to Everytown. In a third of those instances, the abuser then killed themselves and 85 percent of those dual tragedies involved a firearm. The figure is likely underrepresented due to uneven state-by-state data collection. It also doesn’t include women who were injured by their partner’s firearm, or threatened with one. 

Crucially, this type of lethal violence is preventable. Policy analysis showed that states with strong gun control laws had three times fewer incidents of domestic violence homicide-suicide versus states with the weakest legal codes. 

“The lethality and accessibility of firearms give abusers in suicidal crisis the ability to overpower and harm multiple people with little chance for intervention or survival,” according to the report. 

When an abuser shoots their partner, then kills themself, the trauma ripples through a community. Everytown gathered a focus group of 43 survivors of this type of violence last year, and participants reported that children were witnesses in 43 percent of domestic-violence homicide suicides. 

One tool Everytown points to that can help prevent such crimes is an Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO), which confiscates firearms from someone deemed to be an immediate threat to themselves or others. 

A study of Oregon’s ERPO law found such orders were most frequently issued against someone at risk of suicide — important because 1 in 4 members of Everytown’s focus group said perpetrators of intimate partner homicide-suicide had a history of suicidal behaviors. 

“Research very clearly shows that laws that are intended to disarm abusers work and they’re really, really critical to the safety of survivors,” Rajan said. A paper from 2018 found states that prevent subjects of domestic violence restraining orders from owning a gun had a permanent reduction in intimate partner homicides. Extreme risk orders have been shown to result in fewer suicides.

Doreen Dodgen-Magee was among the people who testified in support of creating Oregon’s law. Thirty years ago, she held a party on the eve of her niece’s first day of kindergarten. Family and loved ones filled Sarah’s backpack with love notes and well wishes. The next day, Dodgen-Magee got a phone call saying Sarah’s father had shot and killed Sarah, her younger siblings, Rachel and April, and their mother, Laura, in a fit of jealous rage. He also shot Dodgen-Magee’s mother-in-law, Margaret, who survived but needed a caretaker for the rest of her life. 

Dodgen-Magee believes an ERPO could have helped save Laura and her children. 

“It’s not just having those laws in place, but then doing the really hard work of making sure that everyone in the community knows about them,” she said. 

ERPOs didn’t yet exist in Oregon in 1995. Dodgen-Magee and her husband had helped Laura recognize the signs of an abusive relationship and supported her when she filed for divorce. Laura’s ex had a history of violence; after she moved out to live with her mom, he broke into their house and raped her. Laura filed for a restraining order, but it didn’t prevent her death. 

After the shooting, Dodgen-Magee found journals where Laura wrote down her fears of her ex killing her. She wrote that if anything happened to her, Dodgen-Magee and her husband should get custody of her children. But Laura’s ex was able to get a gun and kill them all. 

Today, Dodgen-Magee is a psychologist and teaches continuing education units for other practitioners. In every training, she has participants look up ERPO laws in their state and save the appropriate hotline to their phone. The laws don’t do any good if the people equipped to help aren’t aware of them, or the women who are in danger don’t know about their existence. 

There isn’t a day that goes by without Dodgen-Magee reflecting on her lost family members and how the tragedy has shaped her life. 

“I feel more compelled than I do called to this work. I feel like I must,” she said. “I must make the world understand that these were four beautiful, beautiful, important people in the world who should still be here, and could still be here if we could come together around making sure that people who shouldn’t own firearms or have access to them don’t.”