By Maryclaire Dale, Associated PressJanet Paulsen shows a photo of some of the dozens of guns that police seized from her estranged husband days before he ambushed her at their home in 2015. Paulsen still lives in the home in Acworth, Ga., Monday, Aug. 7, 2023. “Every step of the way it seemed like his rights were more important … than mine and my children’s,” she says.
That changed a few days later when she said he tried to track them through a phone locator app, a violation of the protection order that prompted a misdemeanor charge, two hours in jail and a court order to confiscate his guns. An X-ray shows a bullet lodged in Janet Paulsen’s spine after her estranged husband ambushed her in their garage in 2015 before turning the gun on himself. Paulsen, now partially paralyzed, still lives in the home in Acworth, Ga., Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023.
It’s a less adversarial, non-criminal program that’s become a model for other counties. But the effort, and similar ones across the country, could be in jeopardy as the U.S. Supreme Court considers next month whether people can be forced to relinquish their weapons before a conviction. That worries advocates who point to new data that show gun seizures could reduce the nation’s 2,500 or more annual domestic violence deaths — more than half of which involve guns —. The most dangerous time for victims is when they try to leave a relationship, long before their abuser would be convicted of anything.
“You have victims just pulling up stakes, because they don’t want to be in that situation,” said Jordan Ferguson, a retired Spokane police sergeant now with the Spokane Regional Domestic Violence Coalition. Although she didn’t know it then, the presence of a gun made it five times more likely that Isabelle would die by her husband’s hands, according to Everytown for Gun Safety’s analysis of available data. She just prayed he would spare their young boys.
Only a small fraction of abusers go on to commit mass shootings. However, more than half of the perpetrators of mass shootings have a history of family or gender violence, including the school shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary, who killed his mother that morning, and the gunman in Uvalde, who sent sexually violent threats to women in his video gaming community.
In 2014, Ross herself was shot and paralyzed by her estranged husband, who also shot a male friend in her car before killing himself. She had not sought a protection order because, as a prosecutor, she did not think she had enough evidence until it was too late.
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