By 2021, the United States is expected to have nearly 18,000 domestic homicides involving firearms, a threefold increase in just 10 years, the New York Times reported Friday.
The Times reviewed six years of police reports, as well as reporting by other news outlets, and reported that these rising fatalities could account for a large share of the city’s recent spike in gun homicides, which represent an increase of around 1,700 from 2016 to 2018, according to the nonprofit group Everytown for Gun Safety.
Adding to the dangers are tens of thousands of accidental shootings in which guns are involved in incidents that result in far fewer fatalities than in domestic homicides, according to the Times.
Additionally, new analyses published Friday have found that women have been shot dead in several intimate-partner killings involving men disguised as women.
According to a study published in the journal Medical Journal of Australia, 8.6 percent of women killed by their intimate partners in the United States in 2015 were dressed as a woman when they were killed — an increase from less than 3 percent in 1980.
Women are responsible for just 8 percent of the U.S. firearm homicide rate, the study found, and were responsible for 4.5 percent of these cases in 2015. But the study suggests that they may be more at risk than men: Around 30 percent of the non-fatal victims of these shootings are women.
Using police data, the Times also found a distinct, consistent trend of rising deaths of both men and women by firearms in the U.S. because of escalating domestic-violence violence. Of the 9,900 domestic homicides across the country from 2015 to 2017, 9 percent were nonfatal, another 2,560 were fatal, and the rest were neither fatal nor nonfatal.
“We have this overall correlation but we don’t know much about it,” Margarita Liban, an associate professor at San Diego State University, told the Times. “We’re looking for stronger trends.”
Read the full New York Times report.
