Domestic violence is a horrible thing, something that we should all work to remove from the planet. The idea of someone who claims to love someone else hurting that person and continuing to do so over and over again…it just doesn’t make any sense. Then again, rationality often goes out the window when emotion gets involved, and 99 times out of 100, this is about emotion.

However, one unfortunate byproduct of domestic violence–in particular, homicides related to domestic violence–is the push to enact gun control because of these horrible incidents. Especially since it seems COVID has increased domestic violence.

According to Everytown For Gun Safety, over half of woman victims of intimate partner homicide in the US are killed with a gun. Roughly 53 women are shot and killed by their partner in an average month throughout the US, according to its website. Moreover, about 92 percent of all women killed with guns in high-income countries in 2015 were from the US.

While the rate of killings of women by violent partners with a firearm has increased in recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused victims to stay inside with their abusers, accelerating the rates of domestic violence around the world.

“Family violence during pandemics is associated with a range of factors including economic stress, disaster‐related instability, increased exposure to exploitative relationships, and reduced options for support,” explained a study from the National Institutes of Health. It noted, “Reports of domestic abuse and family violence have increased around the world since social isolation and quarantine measures came into force. Recently, anecdotal evidence from the United States, China, Brazil, and Australia indicates increases in intimate partner, women, and children violence due to isolation and quarantine.”

I agree, this is awful, but there are a couple of things you’re going to find missing from the general narrative taking place.

First, let’s remember that it’s already illegal for anyone who has been convicted of domestic violence to own a firearm. With that, you can lump domestic abusers into one of two categories: those who have been convicted and those who haven’t.

For those who have been convicted, it’s already illegal for them to have a gun. For those who haven’t been convicted, well, that’s the problem. They haven’t been convicted of a crime, so how do you propose we deal with these individuals without impacted people who have done nothing wrong, including women who want a firearm to protect themselves from their abusers?

Second, let’s look at the claim that more than half of all women killed by a partner are shot.

That may well be true. They fail to provide a link to their source, but say its from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program. They also fail to provide an exact percentage, so it could be anything over 50 percent. However, usually if someone says over half, you’re generally looking at only slightly more than 50 percent. Often a mere fraction more.

Yet, when you look at overall homicides by weapon, 67 percent of all homicides from 2010-2014 were carried out with a firearm. That, too, is from the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, in case someone thought the statistics were being compiled in different ways. In other words, an abusive spouse is less likely to use a gun to kill his victim than a garden variety criminal.

Frankly, I think domestic abusers should be locked up for a good long time. Make them felonies and call it a day. I don’t harbor sympathy for these people.

But I’m sick and damned tired of my rights being up for discussion because of the actions of various scumbags, especially when statistics don’t actually support many of the claims in the first place.