As investigators continue to hunt for a motive after a lone gunman opened fire at a church in Texas killing at least 26 people and injuring 20 more, experts on gun violence say the tragedy shines a dark spotlight on a common link in mass killings: domestic violence.
U.S. authorities have identified Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, as the suspected gunman who entered a Baptist church in the small south Texas community of Sutherland Springs and began firing into the pews of congregants gathered for Sunday morning worship services.
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The victims ranged in age from 18 months to 77.
“It’s unbelievable to see children, men and women, laying there. Defenceless people,” Wilson County Sheriff Joe D. Tackitt Jr. told reporters.
It’s been reported that Kelley was discharged from the Air Force in 2012 for allegedly assaulting his spouse and a child. A spokesperson for the Air Force said he receive 12 months’ confinement after the court-martial and ultimately received a bad conduct discharge and reduction in rank.
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Officials in Texas also said the shooter had sent his mother-in-law threatening messages and Kelley did not have a license to carry a weapon.
Nancy Leung, a professor of law at the University of Denver, said the shooting follows a historical pattern where the alleged shooter has a history of domestic violence or espousing abusive attitudes towards women.
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“Not everybody who commits domestic violence becomes a mass shooter,” Leung told Global News. “It’s fair to call it a common thread among people who engage in mass shootings and a potential warning sign as we think about how to deal with these mass shootings moving forward.”
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Robert Spitzer, a political science professor at the State University of New York Cortland and the author of several books on gun policy, including The Politics of Gun Control, said there is “quite a notable correlation” between mass shooters and a history of abusing women.
“It’s clear that something is going on,” Spitzer said. “It’s not as though everybody or even a significant percentage of people who are involved in domestic violence wind up engaging in mass shootings.”
“Yet there is this trail of violence against intimates.”
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Stephen Paddock, who opened fire on an outdoor music festival on the Las Vegas Strip killing 58 people and wounding more than 500 on Oct. 1, regularly berated his girlfriend in front of others at the local Starbucks, according to reporting from the Los Angeles Times.
Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016, had physically abused his ex-wife and prevented her from speaking to her family.
Elliot Rodger, who killed six and wounded 13 in Isla Vista, Calif., in 2014, declared his hatred for women in a rambling online post before the attack and was obsessed with his perceived rejection by women.
Cedric Ford, who shot 17 people in 2016 at the Newton, Kan., plant where he worked, killing three, had been accused of abusing his ex-girlfriend and had been served with a protection order that likely triggered the attack.
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Robert Dear, who gunned down three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs in 2015, had a history of domestic violence and harassment toward women, according to police.
Seungh Hui Cho, 23, who massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech in April 2007, was accused of harassing two women at the university two years earlier, according to the FBI.
“This pattern of domestic abuse, perhaps, should be a more important factor among the factors that are listed as prohibited for a person who wants to buy a gun,” Spitzer said.
And here in Canada the December 2014 mass shooting in Edmonton was perpetrated by a man with a history of domestic and sexual assault who killed eight of his relatives, including two children. In 1989, the 14 women killed at Montreal’s École Polytechnique were targeted by the gunman for being female engineering students.
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Research from Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group, analyzed FBI data on mass shootings from 2009 to 2016 and found that 57 per cent of the cases included a spouse, former spouse or other family member among the victims.
A 2016 study from Boston University shows that in states with more gun owners, women are more likely to be the victims of homicide.
“In the United States, we don’t take domestic violence seriously enough,” Leung said. “We should treat it the same way we treat other crimes with the same types of penalties and the same types of restrictions on people who engage in domestic violence as opposed to other kinds of violence.”
— With a file from the Associated Press
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