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Editorial

The One-Sided Gun War of the Sexes

Credit...Rose Wong

One bit of woeful shorthand used in tallying the nation’s gun carnage is “I.P.V.” — intimate partner violence. This is a category in which each week close to 10 women are shot to death by their husbands, boyfriends or former dating partners. The victims and gunmen go unnoticed on the national scene unless the shooting turns into a larger tragedy, like the school invasion on Monday in California, in which a man murdered his wife as she taught class and, in his rampage, killed an 8-year-old student.

It turned out that the man, who ended his spree with suicide, had a history of domestic violence and threats that should have denied him ownership of a firearm. But, as with so many of the nation’s shameful gun control laws, weak enforcement and loopholes helped perpetrate another I.P.V. shooting.

The toll of hundreds of defenseless women shot to death each year by current or former partners is a tragedy crying out for more thorough and sensible gun controls. Law enforcement professionals bedeviled by routine domestic disputes know well how these disputes can escalate into gun tragedies. There are federal and state laws designed to rein in the problem, but they are spotty and need to be strengthened, particularly in specifying what authority and obligation the police have to confiscate the guns of abusers.

These supposedly isolated human agonies too often turn into wider gun carnage. About half of the mass shootings in recent years with four or more victims had at their core the shooter’s killing of a current or former partner or family member, according to an analysis by Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy group.

Eighteen states have laws either requiring the police to seize guns at domestic abuse scenes or giving them discretion to do so. Twenty states have courts make the decision when they issue protection orders. (A few of these states take both approaches.) But varying circumstances and resources too often undermine enforcement. And 23 states have no confiscation protections.

Polls show that most Americans — Republicans as well as Democrats — think it common sense to require gun owners to surrender their firearms upon a first arrest for domestic violence or a court order protecting fearful partners. The rights of potential gun victims, not those of aberrant gun owners, must be paramount.

The fright and danger are real, as abusers double back on their disaffected partners, using handguns in the majority of homicides. The I.P.V. deaths are driven by rage in which perpetrators stalk and hunt down women who flee to protect the lives of their children and themselves. Some women secretly arm themselves in self-defense, but the grim statistics of I.P.V. homicide show it’s a one-sided war of the sexes.

Federal laws were passed in the 1990s to protect women by denying firearms to domestic abusers. But the states have not met a crucial obligation to provide adequate case histories to the federal data center where background checks are made on potential gun buyers.

With Republican majorities in Congress inert on the need for greater gun safety, statehouse politicians are becoming more responsive. In the last two years, more than a dozen states passed laws to constrain domestic abusers who own firearms, according to The Associated Press. This rare patch of bipartisan cooperation shows gun rights are not absolute. “Intimate partner violence” is a frightening term that should embarrass more lawmakers into action.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: The One-Sided Gun War of the Sexes. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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