This report was developed to comply with a U.S. House Appropriations Committee directive that requested the Attorney General to investigate whether it is possible to use an individual’s history of domestic violence to determine the likelihood that “he will commit a mass shooting.”
The U.S. Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) then added a request to determine whether there is potential for criminal justice professionals to use records of domestic violence offenses as part of a process of assessing risk for engaging in a mass shooting. This report resulted from an extensive literature review of domestic violence and its link with mass killings. Although definitions of “domestic violence” and “mass shootings” have varying definitions in the literature reviewed, these variations did not influence the conclusions of this review. State statutes and academic researchers usually use broader definitions of “domestic violence” that include emotional, psychological, and economic abuse based in tactics that include intimidation, isolation, threats, blaming victims, and using their children against the victim. Congress defines “mass shootings” as killings of three or more people, not including the shooter. The current report adopted the usual practice of excluding mass killings that are part of other criminal events, such as robberies. This report concludes that the relative frequencies of domestic violence and mass shootings prevent using a man’s domestic-abuse history to forecast his likelihood of committing a mass shooting. There are vastly more domestic abusers than mass shooters; however, in jurisdictions that hold men accountable for abusive behavior toward an intimate partner. There are reports of reduced intimate-partner homicides and, by extension, domestic mass murders. 2 tables and 98 references