It's Time to Talk About What Guns Have to Do With Dating
"So can we talk about your guns?"
You've watched pundits and politicos debate the issue. Maybe you've joined in the hashtag chorus, whether #NotOneMore or #ProGun. But in order to truly save lives, the conversation has to get intimate. "We need to start talking about gun safety in our relationships - now," says Rob Valente, vice president of policy for the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
Nearly one-third of all U.S. households had at least one gun in 2014. And those weapons are three times as likely to be owned by a man than a woman, according to a 2013 Pew Research Center report. Does the person you're dating own a firearm? Have you ever talked about gun safety?
For Jessica, a 26-year-old in Sheridan, Illinois, shooting is a shared interest with her fiancé. "We talk about guns openly," she says. "I know that he's responsible." But some women don't even know where to start the conversation. Emily, a 21-year-old college student in Baltimore, says that "most younger people have similar views on issues like sex and birth control so those are generally less controversial topics. But a lot of people my age have different views on guns, so it's something that I'd be less likely to talk about openly."
Cosmo talked to some women who love guns, some who loathe them, and a lot in between. And every woman agreed that she would want to know if the man she was dating owned a firearm. "I don't want to look in a drawer for a towel and instead find a gun," says Crystal, 23, who lives in New York City and is dating a police officer. Hudson, a 21-year-old student from Orono, Minnesota, agrees. "I'd be alarmed if he did not feel comfortable talking about it," she says.
That's a smart instinct. While no one wants to imagine her partner would hurt her, the stats tell another truth: 1 in 3 women will experience abuse in her lifetime, according to the CDC. Nearly 1 in 5 may be stalked. And when a gun is present in a domestic-violence situation, a study in the American Journal of Public Health found, it raises a woman's risk for being killed by 500 percent. Single women are especially vulnerable, because laws give them less protection than married women, argues Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, part of the gun-violence prevention group Everytown for Gun Safety.
That's why Cosmopolitan and Everytown are partnering for a campaign called Singled Out, to raise awareness among unmarried women of the risk for gun violence and the gaps in the law. Visit SingledOut.org for info and action you can take. And keep talking. Bringing up guns can be awkward, but as with abortion and STIs, you should know where your partner stands. "It's crucial that single women understand the risk factors and tackle talking directly about the role guns may play in their daily lives," says Watts. "Being armed with the facts isn't anti-gun, it's pro-information. And it may save your life."
Shannon Estes awoke early last July 25 to three missed calls - 2:35 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m. She assumed it was a mistake. No one ever called the 45-year-old mother of five that late. She got up and made coffee before listening to the messages.
The first two were from a detective from the Phoenix Police Department. Estes's mind started racing - her sons were asleep at her home, and she had just seen Shayley, her 22-year-old daughter, the day before at the air-conditioning company where Shayley worked as a manager.
The third message was from a woman who said, "I'm very sorry for your loss. The suspect is in custody."
Shannon started screaming. Her boys came running to the room, Shannon recalls. "I sank to my knees and cried, 'I think something happened to Shayley!'"
Soon detectives would call to confirm what she feared. Igor Zubko, Shayley's 26-year-old ex-boyfriend - whom she had filed a protective order against 10 days earlier - had used his key to enter the house they once shared. He was waiting for her when she arrived home from work, according to the police report. Prosecutors say he killed her and then drove to the Phoenix airport. That's where police arrested him.
Shannon Estes knew that Zubko had threatened her daughter. A stream of frightening text messages had begun the night Shayley had filed the protective order. Zubko had sent Shayley's roommate a text saying, "She will be brutally murdered, from Russia with love."
But Shayley had assured her mom that he was bluffing. Estes certainly hadn't thought he was capable of murdering her daughter nor could she imagine how he did it. "I never thought of a gun," Estes explains. "I knew he never owned one." Besides, Zubko was a Russian national and had been served a protective order. Neverthe less, Zubko had shot Shayley with a Sig Sauer handgun. In her deep grief, Estes's first thought was, How the hell did he get a gun?
This is a question we should all be asking every time a woman is killed by her intimate partner. More than 8,700 women were shot to death by their partners between 2000 and 2013. And while violence within marriages has gone down, "boyfriends are becoming an increasingly large proportion of those who commit intimate-partner homicides," says Shannon Frattaroli, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Center for Gun Policy and Research.
Meanwhile, Frattaroli says, our poorly written laws make women - particularly single women - more vulnerable to gun violence than they need to be. Federal law does nothing to keep guns out of the hands of a large category of abusive dating partners and convicted stalkers. And even when they are prohibited from possessing guns, abusers and stalkers can evade the law by purchasing guns from unlicensed private sellers without undergoing a background check.
"Gun violence is a women's issue," says Kiersten Stewart, the Washington-based policy director of the organization Futures Without Violence. "The data tells us that guns take domestic violence from a black eye to a body bag."
Igor Zubko bought the gun he used to kill Shayley through Backpage.com, a website similar to Craigslist. Under current law, the seller did nothing illegal. But Shayley is dead, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Zubko, who has indicated a desire to plead guilty and is awaiting trial.
Online sites have become the easiest way for criminals to evade the background check required at all federally licensed gun shops. Under the 1994 Brady Bill, anyone who wants to buy a gun at a retail store has to fill out a form, which is run through an FBI database. If the buyer has a clean record, he or she can proceed with the purchase. If he shows up in the system as a prohibitor - meaning he has a felony conviction or court-adjudicated mental illness, uses drugs, or is in the U.S. illegally, among other reasons - he cannot. The database will also flag anyone convicted of a domestic-violence misdemeanor crime (such as assault) or who has an active protective order against them.
In a private sale - at a gun show, online, or between friends - none of these checks are required. "People who know they can't pass a background check can find someone selling a gun, meet them in a parking lot, and exchange the gun for cash with no questions asked," explains Elizabeth Avore, legal director for Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun-violence prevention organization. "The seller is doing nothing illegal. That's a valid sale - and a glaring loophole."
Unlicensed sellers online are transferring tens of thousands of guns each year to domestic abusers and other prohibitors, according to an Everytown investigation, which also found that 1 in 30 prospective buyers on Armslist.com, one of the most popular gun websites, had a prohibiting felony or a domestic-violence history.
The National Rifle Association, which advocates for gun rights, opposes expansion of background checks. "Getting a gun is a constitutional right," explains Catherine Mortensen, the NRA's media liaison. "We want to ensure that anyone who is losing the constitutional right has due process." She cites a case where a woman reportedly being threatened by her ex sought to buy a gun, only to be killed during the waiting period. "We think a woman should have the right to defend herself," Mortensen says.
The current FBI database is incomplete, Mortensen says, with many mental-health records and felony convictions missing. The NRA supports legislation to update it rather than expand its use. "Why would we want to expand a system that does not work?" she says, adding that "a lot of times, domestic-violence perpetrators are going to get their guns through some illegal channel anyway." Rather than asking how to keep guns from them, she says, "The question more rightly is, how do you stop people from being abusers? It is not about guns."
Despite NRA opposition, there are increasing efforts to close the private-sale loophole. In January, President Obama moved to expand checks by requiring anyone who sells large quantities of guns to become licensed. And 18 states have gone further than federal law, requiring that all handgun sales be run through various state and federal databases. In those states, Avore says, 46 percent fewer women are shot to death by intimate partners. Still, without a national solution, criminals remain able to buy guns from a state with weak laws and bring them to states with stronger ones. (Ninety percent of weapons police recover after gun crimes in NYC come from out of state, notes Avore.)
Current rules also leave intact the so-called boyfriend loophole. "Single women aren't as protected," Stewart says. "If your boyfriend abuses you but does not live with you or have a child with you, then that abuse is not defined as domestic violence." He would get a misdemeanor assault conviction, but it would not be entered into the background-check database. In short, your boyfriend could be arrested for hitting you one day and still legally buy a gun the next.
Since the early 1990s, when the Brady background-check law was written, relationship demographics have changed. Women wait to get married or decide not to marry. They may live on their own, have more than one boyfriend, or date both women and men. "Changing the federal law to include all partners is the first step toward protecting young women," says Stewart.
Nine states and Washington, D.C., have recognized dating partners in the definition of domestic violence. In Congress, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Representative Debbie Dingell (D-MI) have drafted bills (and have both found Republican co-sponsors) that would address the loophole. "It's a pretty simple fix," Avore explains. "Just add 'boyfriend' to the definition."
The word "stalker" should be added too. "Right now, people convicted of misdemeanor stalking can still buy guns," says Marium Durrani, the public policy attorney at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, "and stalking is most often an intimate crime. It could be someone you worked with or dated."
Jitka Vesel, a 36-year-old translator in Chicago, met the man who would become her stalker through the online video game World of Warcraft. Dmitry Smirnov, 26, was a fellow immigrant from Eastern Europe. He had settled in British Columbia, Canada, where he was a college student. After befriending Vesel online in 2008, Smirnov mentioned he would be touring the States that winter. She invited him to stay with her family in Chicago for Christmas.
Theresa O'Rourke, Vesel's best friend since childhood, barely recalls meeting him that holiday. "He was a quiet, geeky sort of guy," she says. "He was not her boyfriend, but he wanted to be."
When Smirnov returned to Canada, he began to send incessant emails and texts, according to a harassment report Vesel filed with police in Illinois. Vesel asked him to stop. When he wouldn't, O'Rourke says her friend stopped engaging entirely. "She changed her telephone number and contacted the game people so he couldn't contact her there anymore," O'Rourke says. Because he was Canadian, her local police suggested she call the authorities there. She did, according to Benjamin Kadolph, a sergeant with the Oak Brook Police who worked on the case.
That did not stop Smir nov from entering the United States in April 2011. Smirnov found a .40 caliber Smith and Wesson handgun for sale on Armslist.com and arranged to collect it in Washington, court records show. The seller, Benedict Ladera, later admitted to the police that he knew Smirnov was not a U.S. resident. In fact, he pocketed an extra $200 because of this.
Smirnov paid a homeless man to buy him ammunition and drove to Chicago. He secretly stalked Vesel for a week, and even put a GPS device on her car, before approaching her in the parking lot of her workplace. He shot her 11 times.
O'Rourke was so angry that Smirnov had been able to buy a gun that she reached out to the Brady Campaign to ask what she could do. The group worked with Vesel's brother to file a lawsuit against Armslist.com. "When Jitka got her citizenship, she was so proud!" O'Rourke says. "I was pissed because America failed her. We need to take violence seriously. I don't ever want to hear 'Well, if she had a gun.' Her having a gun was not going to save her life. His not getting one would have."
Smirnov pleaded guilty to stalking and murder, and was sent to prison for life. That did not bring O'Rourke peace. Nor did the criminal case against Ladera, who also pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year in prison. "I believe this weighs heavily on him," she says, "but I have not found forgiveness. His bad choices led to my friend's death."
The Armslist lawsuit failed in court, but it was the first of its kind, landing coverage in the New York Times. One day later, Adam Lanza stormed Sandy Hook elementary school and killed 26 people and himself.
It is horrifying acts like these - in Newtown, Charleston, San Bernardino, and too many others to bear - that we think about when we use the term 'gun violence.' Yet it is much more likely for a woman to be killed by her partner in this country than by a loner with mental illness or a jihadist attack. When Everytown analyzed all the mass shootings since 2009, the majority were domestic-violence related. And the group found that in states that require background checks, there are fewer mass shootings.
Finding ways to keep guns out of the hands of abusers - particularly in the danger period right after a breakup - should be our urgent priority, says David Adams, author of Why Do They Kill? Adams is the co-founder of Emerge, an abuser intervention program, and has spent 30 years working with and interviewing men who hurt women. "People say, 'If he didn't kill her with a gun, he would have killed her anyway,'" Adams says. "For my book, I asked all the killers I interviewed, 'Would you have killed her if you did not have a gun?' Eleven out of 14 killers said absolutely not."
Red Flags for Gun Violence
1. An abusive relationship. Signs of an unsafe relationship include a shift from ultra-charming to controlling behavior and attempts to isolate you or monopolize your time, says David Adams, author of Why Do They Kill? Whether it's about sex or any other issue, ask yourself, Can I say no without his making an issue of it?
2. He has threatened you with his gun. This could include waving it or holding it while berating you. "If he gets his gun after a bad fight, perhaps to clean it or put it in his pocket," says Adams, "this is another way of saying, 'I have this and I will use it.'"
3. He has made suicide threats. "You have to think homicide as well if he is already thinking about suicide," Adams says.
4. Alcohol plus extreme jealousy. "One-third of the killers who I interviewed were what I call jealous drunks," Adams explains. "Alcohol fueled their jealous ruminations." Unemployment can also give someone more time to brood over a volatile situation.
5. You've left a bad relationship. People often ask, "Why didn't she leave?" In fact, many victims of relationship gun violence had left. The most dangerous time for a woman is the period of time after a breakup.
If any of this sounds familiar, the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1(800) 799-SAFE has trained experts to help you create a safety plan.
This article was originally published as "Love and Guns" in the March 2016 issue of Cosmopolitan.
