MADISON, Wis – Provisions tucked into a Republican bill relaxing Wisconsin’s concealed carry would allow felons and domestic abuse suspects to possess antique firearms.
Right now, felons in Wisconsin can’t own firearms for the rest of their lives. People under restraining orders often have to surrender their weapons as well.
Sen. David Craig’s bill would allow people to carry concealed weapons without a permit. It also would allow felons and those under restraining orders to possess firearms manufactured before 1899. That would mean felons and domestic abusers could own lever-action rifles, revolvers, muzzleloaders and early forms of semi-automatic pistols.
Some people with felony convictions have argued they should be allowed to own guns so they can hunt. But Chase Tarrier, public policy coordinator for End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin, calls the provisions dangerous.
CONTACT YOUR STATE SENATOR IF YOU OBJECT TO THIS BILL.
(920) 391-2000 Email:
Sen.Hansen@legis.wisconsin.gov
Or contact Sen. David Craig directly:
Rep.Craig@legis.wisconsin.gov
(608) 266-3363
Have you lost a loved one to domestic violence? Help is available for survivors of crime pursuing higher education. Please see the following list of twelve scholarships for further information:
Allstate Foundation Moving Ahead Grants
Deadline: Ongoing
Since finances often play an important role for many victims when considering whether to leave an abusive relationship, the Allstate Foundation has created the Moving Ahead Grants to provide up to $10,000 to survivors of domestic violence in order to achieve financial independence by participating in higher education, career training, or job readiness programs. Furthermore, recipients are invited to join Allstate’s financial education programs to gain an understanding of basic financial services and develop money-management skills.
With the mission of creating a sense of empowerment and self-esteem among victims of violent crimes, the Jacqueline Harrison Memorial Scholarship (JHMS) is awarded annually to financially assist college-bound students who themselves or whose parents were victims of a violent crime. Qualified students pursuing a bachelor’s degree must provide a
current resume
500-word personal essay
official transcript
three letters of recommendation
financial statement
proof of a continuing participation in community service )
Contact
Jacqueline Harrison Memorial Scholarship
P.O. Box 416
Suitland, MD 20752
(202) 670-5467
jhmsfund@gmail.com
Horatio Alger National Scholarship Program
Deadline: October 25th
As one of the largest college financial aid programs in the nation, the Horatio Alger National Scholarship Program has been created to specifically assist graduating high school students who have faced and overcome great adversity in their young lives, including victimization. Qualified applicants must be
pursuing a bachelor’s degree at an accredited non-profit U.S. institution
demonstrate critical financial need
maintain a minimum GPA of 2.0 or higher
display integrity and perseverance by overcoming obstacles.
Contact
Horatio Alger National Scholarship Program
99 Canal Center Plaza Suite 320
Alexandria, VA 22314
(703) 684-9444
scholarships@horatioalger.org
GFWC Success for Survivors Scholarships
Deadline: January 31st
Administered through the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), the Success for Survivors Scholarships award $2,500 to survivors of physical, sexual, emotional, and/or psychological intimate partner abuse who are seeking to obtain a post-secondary education to reshape their future. Eligible candidates must be
permanent legal residents of the United States (YEP!)
provide a recommendation from a licensed domestic violence agency and/or social worker
Contact
GFWC Success for Survivors Scholarships
1734 N Street NW
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 347-3168
Programs@GFWC.org
Arellano Scholarship for Survivors of Domestic Violence
Deadline: February 1st
At Arizona State University, the Arellano Scholarship for Survivors of Domestic Violence offers up to $2,000 to survivors of domestic violence who have been admitted to enroll as a full-time undergraduate student with at least 12 credit hours per semester at ASU. Qualified candidates must provide
a letter of verification from a counselor or clergy member
have a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.0 or higher
demonstrate financial need
exhibit potential to continue with their college career in good standing
Contact
Arellano Scholarship for Survivors of Domestic Violence
P.O. Box 2260
Tempe, AZ 85280
(480) 965-2041
seo@asu.edu
David B. Wright Memorial Foundation Scholarship
Deadline: April 10th
In memory of a cabinetmaker and a Marine Corps veteran who was fatally shot as the victim of a robbery attempt in 2009, the David B. Wright Memorial Foundation Scholarship is granted annually to provide financial support to survivors of violent crime and their families for pursuing a higher education degree for a brighter future. Preference will be given to extraordinary college-bound students who are majoring in the areas of human services, counseling, mathematics, science, engineering, or carpentry.
Contact
David B. Wright Memorial Foundation Scholarship
P.O. Box 13222
Baltimore, MD 21203
(410) 812-2371
info@davidbwrightmemorialfoundation.org
Kennedy Foundation Scholarships for Victims
Deadline: April 21st
Founded on the belief that education inspires hope and independence, the Kennedy Foundation Scholarships for Victims have been created to cover the full tuition costs of attending on-campus undergraduate courses full-time at Howard University in Washington, DC for survivors of domestic violence. For consideration, applicants must:
submit an online application
attach a short 250-word essay on professional goals
agree to serve as a role model in the on-campus DMV community.
Contact
Kennedy Foundation Scholarships for Victims
12138 Central Avenue Suite 665
Mitchellville, MD 20721
(240) 893-0018
kennedyfoundation@yahoo.com
Peyton Tuthill Foundation Hearts of Hope Scholarship
Deadline: May 1st
In memory of 23-year-old woman who was sexually assaulted, tortured, and murdered by an unsupervised probationer in 1999, the Peyton Tuthill Foundation Hearts of Hope Scholarship is available annually to homicide survivors and victims of crime who are enrolling as full-time undergraduate students at an approved U.S. institution. Applicants must have
completed one year of grief counseling
have been the victim of a crime that occurred at least 18 months prior to submission
and possess a cumulative GPA of 2.5 or better.
Contact
Peyton Tuthill Foundation Hearts of Hope Scholarship
P.O. Box 3144
Tallahassee, FL 32303
info@peytontuthill.org
Catina Rose Memorial Foundation Scholarship
Deadline: May 31st
Sponsored by the Crime Victims United Charitable Foundation in honor of a brave young woman who was molested and later testified in court against her molester, the Catina Rose Memorial Foundation Scholarship is designed to assist young people who have are victim survivors of crime in affording higher education so that they may continue to heal. Applicants must be
active in community service
be between the ages of 17 and 25
have no arrests or convictions
have legal U.S. citizenship.
Contact
Catina Rose Memorial Foundation Scholarship
11400 Atwood Road
Auburn, CA 95603
(530) 885-9544
mail@crimevictimsunited.com
Children Impacted By Crime Scholarship Fund
Deadline: June 1st
With the goal of helping children whose life experiences place their educational opportunities in peril jeopardy, the Children Impacted By Crime Scholarship Fund awards multiple scholarships for up to $1,000 each to children who have been victimized by crime, either themselves or a member of their immediately family. Qualified candidates must be
pursuing a degree at a two or four-year U.S. institution full-time,
be 18 years old or over
maintain a GPA of 2.5 or better.
Contact
Children Impacted By Crime Scholarship Fund
P.O. Box 10-S
Edgewater, FL 32132
(386) 202-4225
Scholarship Link
OVC Crime Victim/Survivor Scholarships
Deadline: June 8th
Sponsored by the Office for Victims of Crime (OVC), the Crime Victim/Survivor Scholarships are presented annually for up to $5,000 to surviving victims of violent crimes in the United States who are
seeking an undergraduate or graduate degree in a human services area with the goal of starting a rewarding career working with other victims of crime.
Applicants must have at least one year of volunteer service with other victims,
demonstrate financial need
provide information about their victimization.
Contact
OVC Crime Victim/Survivor Scholarships
9300 Lee Highway
Fairfax, VA 22031
(866) 682-8822
TTAC@ovcttac.org
For After Freshman Year – New England schools only
College Scholarships to Aid Victims of Violence
The R.O.S.E. Scholarship offers a scholarship award (not more than $10,000) to a female victim of violent crime who is working to overcome her adversities by attending college in the New England area. The scholarship is for those who have completed one fullyear of undergraduate work, and the award will be for tuition and expenses at any college in the Northeast.
Contact
The R.O.S.E. Fund,
Inc., 200 Harvard Mills,
3rd Floor, Wakefield,
MA 01880; 617-482-5400; 800-253-6425;
Fax: 617-482-3443; http://www.rosefund.org; rosefund@ici.net.
When domestic violence offenders are required to relinquish their guns, instead of simply being barred from owning firearms, the risk that those offenders may kill their partners goes down, a new study finds.
The paper, described in the Annals of Internal Medicine, highlights a simple method for lowering the risk women face of being killed by an intimate partner: Enforce the laws already in place.
Each year, the study authors point out, more than 1,800 people are killed by their intimate partners — current or former spouses or people they dated, for example. About half of those killings are carried out with a gun.
Roughly 85% of those victims are women. In fact, nearly half of the women killed in the U.S. each year are killed not by a stranger, but by an intimate partner.
Firearms play a significant role in these domestic violence homicides — a pattern that the law has tried to address for decades. The 1994 Violence Against Women Act banned gun ownership for people with permanent restraining orders because of intimate-partner violence, or IPV. And a 1968 law banning gun ownership for those with an IPV-related felony was extended to include misdemeanors in 1996.
In theory, these laws should be enough; in practice, they’re hard to enforce on the federal level. So state laws have sprung up to fill in the gap.
The problem is, the state laws were modeled after the federal law, which has a gaping loophole: While offenders are not allowed to own a gun, they aren’t explicitly compelled by the law to give up any guns they already have.
Recently, some states have begun to change those laws, putting in additional requirements that IPV offenders actively relinquish their firearms. California is among those states, along with Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Wisconsin, North Carolina and several others.
But do any of the policies in this state-by-state patchwork quilt of gun legislation actually work? It’s been hard to tell because there hasn’t been much research on the effectiveness of different gun laws, said senior author Michael Siegel, an epidemiologist at the Boston University School of Public Health. Without a clear blueprint for what works and what doesn’t, it’s hard to craft good policy.
“It’s not so easy to say to states, ‘OK, here’s a set of policies that we need to pass, and if you pass these, it’ll work,’ ” Siegel said. “And I think the reason for that is that the NRA [National Rifle Association] has successfully blocked federal research on gun control for so many years.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has done minimal research on gun control since the 1997 Dickey Amendment, which banned the use of federal funds to “advocate for or promote gun control.” While not explicitly banning gun violence research, this provision coupled with budget appropriations has had a chilling effect on such work at the CDC.
(Former Republican congressman Jay Dickey from Arkansas, who authored the amendment and died earlier this year, later said he had deep regrets about the legislation and called for more gun-violence research.)
For this study, Siegel and his colleagues decided to use this patchwork of policies as a natural experiment. They compared the intimate-partner homicide rates from 1991 to 2015 for each state, using the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports database. They looked at which states simply banned gun possession for people under IPV-related restraining orders, and which ones went a step further and required those people to actively turn in their firearms. They adjusted for such factors as each state’s violent crime rate (minus homicide), the incarceration rate, the percentage of gun-owning households, the poverty rate, the unemployment rate and the income level.
In states that simply banned gun possession, the gun-related intimate-partner homicide rate did not drop by a statistically significant amount. But in those that required offenders to surrender their guns, that rate dropped by a full 14%.
This drove the overall intimate-partner homicide rate down by 9.7% — which indicated that the laws really did seem to have a significant effect. Would-be offenders weren’t simply resorting to other means of killing now that they did not have a gun.
“This is actually saving people’s lives,” Siegel said.
The research highlights the importance of finding ways to effectively enforce laws that already exist, he added. After all, under either type of law, it is illegal for these offenders to own a gun — but only one compels those offenders to actually comply with that law.
In an editorial on the paper, Dr. Joslyn Fisher of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and Amy Bonomi of Michigan State University in East Lansing called the paper a “timely study that informs a simmering national debate about firearm-related policy.”
“Taken together, these findings underscore the importance of firearm surrender within broader policy debates about domestic abuse,” they wrote.
Women are at greatest risk of being killed by their partners; not strangers.
Most murders of American women involve domestic violence, according to a report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday.
The CDC analyzed data from 18 states, finding 10,018 female homicides between 2003 and 2014. Over half ― 55 percent ― of cases where circumstances were known involved domestic violence. In 93 percent of those cases, victims were killed by current or former intimate partners: boyfriends, husbands, and lovers. The other 7 percent of victims were female friends, family members, first responders and bystanders who were killed during a domestic incident.
While the facts seem shocking at face value, they’re not surprising or new.
Around three women a day are murdered by an intimate partner, and in many cases, children and others are also killed. The majority of mass shootings ― defined as four or more people fatally shot, not including the perpetrator ― involve domestic violence.
The CDC found that firearms were used in 54 percent of all female homicides. Limiting access to guns for those subject to a domestic violence protective order could serve as a preventative measure to help reduce deaths, it said.
Given the risks that guns pose in domestic violence situations, many states have recently passed laws making it harder for abusers to buy or own guns. The National Rifle Association, however, has been pushing a different strategy ― arming victims ― which many experts warn will end in more bloodshed.
The report noted that young women of color were disproportionately affected. One third of female homicide victims were under 30, and a larger proportion of black and Hispanic victims were in this group. Black women had the highest rate of dying by homicide in general.
The CDC recommended the use of “lethality risk assessments”, which are tools used by first responders, advocates and law enforcement to identify victims at the highest risk for future violence. Many experts believe there are important warning signs ― for instance, if the victim has been strangled, experienced death threats, and if her abuser has access to a gun ― that can occur before a situation turns lethal.
According to the report, one in 10 victims of homicides involving domestic abuse had experienced some form of violence in the month before their death, suggesting an opportunity for intervention.
“These assessments might be used to facilitate immediate safety planning and to connect women with other services, such as crisis intervention and counseling, housing, medical and legal advocacy, and access to other community resources,” the CDC report read.
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Melissa Jeltsen covers domestic violence and issues related to women’s health, safety and security. Tips? Feedback? Send an email or follow her on Twitter.
Rainbow House Announces Regional Lethality Assessment Program
Rainbow House is working with all eleven law enforcement agencies throughout Marinette and Oconto Counties on the implementation of the Lethality Assessment Program (LAP), a Maryland research-based model on preventing domestic violence homicide. “I am impressed with each Sheriff Office and Police Department in Oconto and Marinette County for implementing this new policy. From training of all Deputies, Officers and Rainbow House staff on the LAP, we are better prepared to respond to Domestic Violence Incidents and provided safety and resources immediately. I look forward to working closely with Law Enforcement to continue to improve our working collaboration and services to victims and their families,” says Jessica Honish, Lead Advocate at Rainbow House.
Beginning February 27th, LAP will be used at the scene of all domestic violence-related calls to assess the risk inherent in each victim’s situation. Officers will ask victims a series of set questions to determine if they are at heightened risk of injury or great bodily harm. Victims in potentially lethal situations will be placed by law enforcement in immediate contact with the crisis line at Rainbow House to begin safety planning. High danger cases are those in which victims in similar circumstances have been statistically demonstrated to be at risk of being killed by their abusive partner. This program is being implemented to identify those potentially at greatest risk and connect them with life saving services. Only 4% of abused victims had used a domestic violence hotline or shelter within the year prior to being killed by an intimate partner. Yet in the year prior to the homicide, more than 44% of abusers were arrested, and almost one-third of victims contacted the police*. “The gap is where the opportunity for prevention lies. What we can predict, we can prevent,” indicates Courtney Olson. According to her research, almost 90 Wisconsin residents lost their lives to domestic violence homicide in 2016, the highest year on record. For further information see, www.domesticviolencehomicidehelp.com, a program of the Rainbow House. For immediate assistance for yourself or someone you know, call Rainbow House at 715-735-6656.
*Sharps, P. W., et al. (2001). Health care providers’ missed opportunities for preventing femicide. Preventive Medicine 33, 373-80.
