What this issue is all about
We invite you to imagine the problem of American firearm injury. What comes to mind? Which communities are the most affected? Who needs the most resources both to prevent and respond to American gun violence? Who owns America’s guns? Who is the most likely to be harmed?
If you’re familiar with firearm death in the United States, you may have had some of the following thoughts, and you wouldn’t have been wrong: The American firearm death rate (12.4 per 100,000 persons) is the highest of any developed country. About 35% of all gun deaths are homicides, 62% are suicides, and 3% are a mix of deaths from mass shootings, from unintentional discharge, involving law enforcement or from undetermined circumstances. And in most of these cases, the hand on the trigger or the individual in the sights of the gun is a man.
Men are more likely victims and perpetrators of firearm injury, and men are most likely firearm owners. And so we often consider gun violence a mostly male problem.
Mostly, but not only — and the way guns shape women’s lives often falls away from the conversation altogether. This issue of Vital City attempts to serve as a corrective. We ask readers to consider the unique impact and ways that women interact with or are harmed by firearms and to then consider solutions. Though American women’s firearm injury and death rates are lower than American men’s, they are much higher than women’s in other countries. And women are increasingly owners of guns, at rates that would’ve been highly surprising a generation ago.
When we start to see guns through women’s eyes, the policy conversation changes. It changes the strategy considerations for preventing violence and for educating gun owners. The articles in this issue try to explain what we know about women and firearms and the knowledge gaps that still hinder our understanding. Our goal is to spark future research and data collection and to highlight what policymakers can do now as well as ultimately, finding well-tailored interventions that reduce adverse outcomes (like fear, injury and death) and promote positive outcomes (like safer firearm ownership, health and well-being).
Women’s relationship with firearms is distinct from men’s
Let’s begin with how women are harmed by weapons. If the classic picture of a male homicide or injury victim is a young man, shot by a stranger, what’s a female gun homicide or injury victim?
Far too often, it’s someone targeted by her intimate partner. And, far too often, it’s someone pregnant. In a surprising number of cases, victims are older women. Which is not to say that women don’t get involved in street violence, both on the receiving and the giving end; they do.
How women are harmed by guns
Women most commonly are injured or killed by guns used by an intimate partner in the context of domestic violence. The presence of a firearm in an abusive household increases the risk of intimate partner homicide fivefold. While homicide is the worst outcome, firearms may also be used in an abusive relationship to exert coercive control; thus their presence changes the threat calculus even when never fired. Further, when women are harmed, it’s often in their own homes, which, as Erdal Tekin and Michael Ulrich detail in their articles, has implications for the interpretation of legal doctrine — a doctrine built on threats outside of the home.
Homicide — primarily by firearm — leads to more maternal death (defined as the death of those who are pregnant or have recently given birth) in the U.S. than hemorrhage, hypertension and infection. Stated differently, expectant and new mothers are in greater danger from bullets than biology. Lynn Addington points out that, while there is an age gradient, women over the age of 50 are still at risk of intimate partner homicide (which may also involve the shooter dying by suicide).
Finally, women may suffer from firearms due to their caregiver roles. Nelba Márquez-Greene and Zirui Song document that when children and other family members are shot, it is disproportionately women — mothers, sisters, daughters — who absorb the psychological and economic fallout.
At too many turns, the system is underprepared to deal with the unique challenges and threats women face, which could be because they are women, because they know their abuser or both. Alice Ellyson and Sandra Shanahan find that domestic violence protection orders linked to firearm prohibitions represent one of the most evidence-supported tools for reducing intimate partner homicide — but they are chronically underenforced, and in many states abusers under active restraining orders retain easy legal access to guns.
Our systems fail to capture nuance, which is both a feature and a bug. Drs. Ayesha Dholakia and Lois Lee point out that pregnancy is a risk factor for firearm death, but Addington challenges how this risk factor is used in determining older women’s (who are not at risk for pregnancy) firearm risk.
When a woman has a child that suffers from a firearm injury, she suffers too, via mental health costs, but also because she delays her own care — most likely so that she is able to meet the needs of her child(ren). All of this is woefully undercounted in our data systems, making it a near-invisible ripple that rarely surfaces in our policy discussion.
Women as gun owners and shooters
In the cultural and political conversation (which includes cinema, as Monica Castillo documents), women wielding weapons is often treated as a curiosity, but in real life it’s anything but. As Rosanna Smart and Andrew Morral and Margaret Kelley point out in their articles, men’s reasons for firearm ownership cannot simply be mapped onto women.
Smart and Morral document that after more than a decade of stable levels of gun ownership, women’s personal gun ownership rose sharply from 15% of women owning a gun in 2021 to 16% of women owning a gun in 2024. Women are now nearly a third of all gun owners, up from roughly a quarter just six years ago. The pandemic-era firearm shopping spree was concentrated among Republican women and women in the upper Midwest. As a result, the political gap in female ownership has widened sharply: Republican women are now nearly 4 times more likely to own a gun than Democratic women.
In a study of 55 Midwestern female gun owners, Kelley finds that, like men, women’s motivations to own a firearm stem from a fear of victimization and the corresponding desire to be able to protect themselves and others. She also finds that women relate differently to their firearms: They are less likely to carry in public, store guns loaded, or brandish weapons defensively.
If behind many great men are great women, behind many men illicitly obtaining guns are women who helped them do it. Anthony Braga and Marianna Mitchem as well as Brooklyhnn Hitchens and Necole Muhammad focus our attention on women who engage in straw purchasing — that is, they illegally purchase a firearm for someone else. This is often not a story of empowered ownership; it is a story of how disadvantage funnels women into gun markets in ways that put them at greater risk. Jeff Asher investigates lingering questions about women’s gun ownership, many of which spotty data cannot answer. Demographic increases in ownership do not match observed decreases in victimization — though a lag is certainly possible. In general, better causal research is urgently needed to evaluate this question.
Addressing the legal and policy landscape
And when women fire their weapons, the consequences they face are different from those men do.
Because men are more commonly the victims of firearm death, the laws and our case law have been crafted around men’s experience. But if, as the authors throughout this issue point out, women are different, then the case law applied to them does not match the facts of their cases — or their lives. As Michael Ulrich demonstrates, when women use lethal force in self-defense — often after prolonged abuse, in the home, against a known attacker — they fare worse under stand your ground and self-defense frameworks designed for stranger encounters. Is this the justice system we want?
Why women are missing from the conversation
One doesn’t have to look far to see examples of the press heralding the historic declines in murder. These historic declines, which we celebrate, are driven by reductions in firearm homicides of male victims. Though the number of female firearm homicide victims has decreased some, alongside the general decline since the end of the pandemic, they have stabilized and remain high. This means two things: Female firearm homicide rates have not declined as men’s have, and female firearm homicides are now a greater share of all homicides, both those committed with and without a firearm.
The counts and rates are only part of the story: What’s the underlying nature of women’s homicide? Are these community-related shootings, public or mass shootings, or related to domestic violence? How do trends vary by geography: national, state, county and urban versus rural areas? The truth is, the answers to these questions are not easily found due to data gaps.
As Brian Malte and Lyra Monroe point out, these data gaps create cascading blind spots that prevent us from producing complete snapshots, trends or patterns in gun violence. The reality is that the undercounts and omissions create a policy space where women are left out. Policy is silent not because women don’t require an intervention but because we lack the data tools to include their experiences in an accurate way. This is a surefire path to failed policy.
How this special issue responds to the challenge
For too long, we have viewed gun violence in America as a male problem, in which women are collateral. The ways women in America interact with and are affected by guns are distinct and measurable. America’s inability to recognize this has led to research, policy and funding infrastructures that fail to address the problem. This lack of recognition also leads us to ignore women-focused interventions, such as those Lisa Barao and Katharina Neissl describe, that can reduce gun violence overall.
This issue is a call to more fully account for how firearms affect the lives of all Americans — men and women. By including women in how we measure and discuss guns in America, we can better account for how guns enter homes and relationships and who bears the costs when they are misused. We can redefine what it means to survive gun violence and ensure that laws are applied consistently. And we will include our most intimate spaces in explorations of how best to keep people safe.
