The gun industry and its allies regularly assert that the greatest threat to women comes from an attack by a stranger. In reality, the most imminent source of violence to a woman comes from the person with whom she shares her life or, in research terms, her intimate acquaintance. The Department of Justice has found that women are far more likely to be the victims of violent crimes committed by intimate partners than men�especially when a weapon is involved. Moreover, women are much more likely to be victimized at home than in any other place.

Adding a handgun to this mix can have deadly repercussions. A 2001 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on homicide among intimate partners found that female intimate partners are more likely to be murdered with a firearm than all other means combined.

Estimates from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) indicate that from 1993 to 1998, women were victims of violent crimes by their intimate partners an average of more than 935,000 times a year. The Violence Policy Center's annual study When Men Murder Women details national and state-by-state information on female homicides involving one female murder victim and one male offender. In 2004, the most recent data available, firearms were the most common weapon used by males to murder females (811 of 1,663 homicides or 49 percent). Of these, 72 percent (582 of 811) were committed with handguns.

As handgun sales slumped in the mid-1980s among the traditional market of white males, the gun industry and lobbying organizations united to target women as an untapped market. Women represent more than half of the country's population, but make up only 12 percent of gun owners and less than eight percent of handgun owners. Following a well-marked trail charted by the tobacco and alcohol industries, the gun industry believed its sales had nowhere to go but up.

Over the past 15 years two distinct themes have dominated the gun industry's outreach to women. The first has been a course of "firearms feminism," equating gun ownership�almost always handgun ownership�with empowerment. Gun control is presented as a patriarchal power grab to deny women personal growth and freedom. The second approach is the predictable promotion of fear of crime and stranger attack.

However, a woman must consider the risks of having a gun in her home, whether she is in a domestic violence situation or not. While two thirds of women who own guns acquired them "primarily for protection against crime," the results of a California analysis show that "purchasing a handgun provides no protection against homicide among women and is associated with an increase in their risk for intimate partner homicide." A 2003 study about the risks of firearms in the home found that females living with a gun in the home were nearly three times more likely to be murdered than females with no gun in the home. Finally, another study reports, women who were murdered were more likely, not less likely, to have purchased a handgun in the three years prior to their deaths, again invalidating the idea that a handgun has a protective effect against homicide. For women in America, guns are not used to save lives, but to take them.

Press Releases

Studies

• When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 2003 Homicide Data
  
  
• When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 2002 Homicide Data
  
  
• When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 2001 Homicide Data
  
  
• When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 2000 Homicide Data
  
  
• When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 1999 Homicide Data
  
  
• A Deadly Myth: Women, Handguns, and Self-Defense
  
  
• When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 1998 Homicide Data
  
  
• Who Dies? A Look at Firearms Death and Injury in America - Revised Edition

All contents � 1998 Violence Policy Center