Giving Compass' Take:

• New research indicates that 38 percent of mass shooters are also perpetrators of domestic violence. Recommendations from researchers include gun restriction laws around domestic violence to hopefully deter future mass shootings.

• What is the role of donors in progressing gun restrictions or legislation that could help reduce mass shootings? 

• Read why gun violence research matters. 

Under federal law, people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanor crimes are prohibited from purchasing and possessing guns for the rest of their lives. But holes in the system may allow potential mass shooters to slip through the cracks.

The United States currently averages 20 mass shootings per year.

“We found that 38% of known mass shooters had a history of domestic violence, either known to the justice system or mentioned in the media,” says April Zeoli, associate professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University and lead author of a new paper in Criminology & Public Policy.

“Very few of those who committed mass shootings seemed to have firearm restrictions due to domestic violence; the fact that some of them had those restrictions suggests that we are not actually preventing purchase or possession of a gun as well as we could or need to be.”

Some cases of domestic violence never result in firearm restrictions because law enforcement is never involved, because the cases are not referred to prosecutors, because filed charges don’t qualify for firearm restrictions, or because the case doesn’t meet a relationship requirement needed to apply gun restrictions.

Researchers looked at the nearly 90 mass shootings that took place between 2014 and 2017. Zeoli and coauthor Jennifer Paruk cross-checked four separate mass shooting databases—from Every Town for Gun Safety, USA Today, Gun Violence Archives, and Mother Jones—and then used publicly available criminal records to see what other criminal charges the shooters had against them.

The researchers pinpoint ways—called “exit points” in the paper—that firearm restrictions failed to prevent a shooter from buying a gun, which include purchases made through private sales and a failure to report gun disqualifications to the criminal background check system.

Read the full article about domestic violence and mass shootings by Caroline Brooks at Futurity.