An early, high profile example of lethal IVP activated by a partner leaving was the case of Dorothy Stratten, Playboy Playmate of the Month for August 1979. She was shot to death in a murder/suicide by husband Paul Snider when she moved in with movie director Peter Bogdanovich.
DV cases are notoriously complicated for law enforcement because victims can be economically or emotionally dependent on abusers, afraid to press charges because of abusers' reprisals and even turn their anger onto authorities. In response to such vagaries, "safe houses" and victim advocates have been put in place and 27 states now mandate that police make an arrest despite the victim's wishes, if certain conditions are met.
DV and IPV seldom end on their own but escalate from a raised voice to a raised fist to potentially lethal acts. Victims often naively consider a violent act a fluke, especially if it is followed by a period of calm--but IVP is usually progressive and only gets worse. Many consider Oscar Pistorius' (Blade Runner) lethal shooting of his girlfriend in 2013 a classic example of IPV.
Enraged partners with guns are a leading cause of women's deaths in the US
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Most domestic perpetrators have the classic "bully" personality, picking on younger and weaker victims, so it is not surprising DV is often preceded or accompanied by pet abuse. "Animals can be severely affected by domestic violence situations and many people experiencing violence are unwilling to confide in veterinarians or seek help from animal shelters," says a 2012 paper in a veterinary journal. Fear of harm to pets often keeps victims in abusive situations and in some states, emergency hotline workers have been trained to ask about the safety of pets. One woman who wants to remain anonymous told me her husband found her at a motel where she had fled and told her if she did not come home he would kill the couple's dogs.
Such emotionally volatile people are described in the book Violence Against Women in Families and Relationships as fearing abandonment, having a "history of some arrests and perhaps sexual assault" and at high risk of "stalking, separation violence and suicide-homicide." Fewer heterosexual women react to abandonment by male partners with lethal violence possibly because it doesn't coincide so closely with the terrifying feeling of abandonment by "mom."
Despite the fact that most women murdered by intimate partners in the US die from guns the male dominated gun lobby vehemently defends the "gun rights" of abuse suspects and people under orders of protection. They argue that gun ownership is a constitutional right that should not be stripped away for a "mere issuance of court orders" such as are given for DV or IPV. In fact, an NRA bill in Michigan in 2015 would have allowed domestic abusers including those under restraining orders to have guns and even concealed pistol permits until Governor Rick Snyder vetoed it .
The NRA also defended abusers' "rights" in Louisiana in 2015, converging on Baton Rouge to protest adding "dating partner" as a qualifier to a domestic abuse battery law which only named spouses, family members or co-habitants. "Not everyone who got in an argument--had a push, had a shove--is going to come back and do more bodily harm," moaned Bradley Gulotta of Guns Across America. "We don't need to rush to take away people's rights just because they made a mistake." Mistake?
The NRA's Tara Mitchell said a 10-year prohibition on gun owning for convicted batterers violates "a constitutional right." The NRA's Jennifer Baker said the bill was "so overly broad that it could make a felon out of a girlfriend who pulls a cell phone from her boyfriend's hand against his will." Right.
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