The common thread

Domestic violence often leads to other violent acts

When a gunman opened fire at a Chicago hospital earlier this month, killing three people, the incident had something in common with many other mass shootings: It began as an act of domestic violence.

The shooter, Juan Lopez, went to Mercy Hospital to confront the woman who had broken her engagement with him, Dr. Tamara O’Neal. He killed her, a Chicago police officer and a hospital pharmacy resident before being fatally shot.

The gunman’s history included a restraining order from an ex-wife who accused him of abuse and a dismissal from the Chicago

Fire Academy for harassing his colleagues there. As with so many of these cases, the warning signs were there.

The link to domestic violence is a common thread through many mass shootings.

In 1966, one of the most infamous mass shooters, Charles Whitman, murdered his mother and wife before climbing into the bell tower at the University of Texas and killing 16 people. Adam Lanza killed his own mother before turning a gun on classrooms at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

Just this September, a Bakersfield, Calif., man shot his ex-wife at a trucking company before turning the gun on four other people there, and then killing himself as well.

One day later, in Fayette County, four people, including a police officer, were wounded in a district judge’s office by a man who chased his estranged wife into court with gun. He shot at her first and then aimed the gun at others before police shot and killed him. The man knew he would find his wife at court because he was scheduled to appear that day to face charges for assaulting her previously.

Domestic abuse in this country cannot be “fixed,” or “solved,” any more than mass shootings can be simply understood and remedied. There are many levels besides access to weapons and the types of weapons available — mental health and cultural and spiritual health are among them. But the United States can and must do better. We must stop pretending that we can’t, or that there is nothing we can do.

There is much:

• The red flag laws that enable family members and law enforcement to petition courts to temporarily take guns away from people who have demonstrated they are too unstable to have access to weapons are one sensible step.

• Dedicated domestic-violence courts — like drug courts or veterans courts — can focus the criminal justice system’s attention and resources on accused batterers, and stay focused on them. Too often there is no institutional case memory for these thugs. They slip through the cracks in the system. There is almost a built in ineptitude, bordering on indifference, when it comes to domestic violence in most of our courts. We know, for example, that restraining orders alone do little to protect women in grave danger.

Many domestic abusers who ultimately kill have violated multiple restraining orders with impunity.

• We need to give prosecutors and cops the resources and tools they need to better protect women being stalked and threatened. Law enforcement should have powers of legal but proactive surveillance and the flexibility to arrest batterers for other illegal actions — arrests that will remove them from the scene and hence remove the threat, at least temporarily.

• And we need to give women themselves the tools they need to defend themselves, including training in self-defense and use of firearms — if they want it.

Every horrific act of mass violence in this country is inevitably followed by the same familiar questions. How could we have stopped this? What can we do to stop this from happening again?

Well, we can summon our willpower and outrage and begin with small, practical, preventive steps.