Armed Husbands Shoot Seven Women This Week, Five Die
Tuesday, September 1st, 2015
Gun Gendercide Continues
While the nation tries to digest the crime of two media members killed on camera in Virginia by a legal gun owner, a spate of women killed by enraged armed husbands has received less notice.
Hours after receiving a year of unsupervised probation for violating an order of protection against domestic violence filed by his wife, James Terry Colley, Jr. shot and killed his wife Amanda Cloaninger and her friend Lindy Dobbins in St. Augustine, Florida last Thursday, say police. Until Colley was apprehended, three nearby schools were locked down including one where the couple’s child attends.
Two days later, Blessing Okereke was fatally shot in the Bank of America tower in Oak Cliff in Dallas by her husband say police. Husband David Thompson told police he believed his wife was reaching for his pistol, so he shot her in self-defense. Right.
The following day, Nuria N. Kudlach was fatally shot at her home in State College, PA and her husband was charged with first- and third-degree murder the following day. And yesterday Sonja Wells Raine was fatally shot on her job in Pascagoula, MS by her enraged husband according to police. Raine’s “sister got killed the same way by her boyfriend or husband, so that is shocking,” said co-worker Kim Pinkney.
Amazingly, more women were shot by enraged husbands last week. Also shot were Francisca Jew at a donut shop in Devine, Texas and an unidentified Arlington, Washington woman. The Devine and Arlington women are expected to survive.
Half the murders of women in the US each year are by intimate partners and homicide increases 500 percent when a firearm is present. Yet the overwhelmingly male NRA is okay with the gendercide statistics and actually works for the “gun rights” of suspected domestic abusers, also overwhelmingly men. In Michigan the NRA sought to push through a law allowing people under court issued restraining orders to keep their guns. Like David Thompson, the suspect in the Bank of America tower murder in Dallas, they might have to “defend ” themselves.
When women are gunned down by enraged partners, often in public places where others are injured too, the NRA likes to say if women are really scared they should arm themselves too. The rhetoric is offensive. Should Nadia Ezaldein, fatally shot by an enraged boyfriend in front of horrified shoppers as she worked behind the cosmetics counter at Chicago’s Magnificent Mile Nordstrom’s last Black Friday, have kept a gun under the counter just in case?
“Women should arm themselves” is an NRA fiction to occlude the bloody gun “gendercide” committed by known domestic abusers under orders of protection who the gun lobby says have “rights.” In at least four instances in recent years, women who had armed themselves were killed with their own guns because of the element of fear and surprise and because the men were bigger, angrier and motivated perpetrators.
The NRA also likes to say no laws can stop partner murderers, ignoring every developed country in the world where domestic gun homicide does not happen weekly--or at all. If seven men were shot in the head in one week by wives who were known to be violent and armed, would it say the same thing?
Tell these top corporations, with pre-written tweets, to protect their employees and customers by banning guns in their stores and offices.