It has been exactly two years since Jacqueline Bouvier Hardy was pulled off a city bus in Northern Indiana by a former boyfriend and shot to death in front of horrified bystanders, including children. “Jackie” as she was known, was a mother of three who had filed an order of protection against the shooter, Kenneth Knight.
More recently, horrified Black Friday shoppers at Chicago’s Magnificent Mile Nordstrom’s watched Marcus Dee shoot and kill his girlfriend, Nadia Ezaldein, while she worked at the cosmetics counter.
Nearly half the women killed every year in the United States are murdered by intimate partners, mostly with guns, reports the New York Times. Intimate partner homicide increases by 500 percent when a firearm is present.
It is not just the women stalked by violent, armed exes who are terrorized. Increasingly, gun-wielding exes kill the women in proximity to their wives and girlfriends. In 2012, the year of the Sandy Hook massacre, Bradford Baument strode into Las Dominicanas M & M Salon near Orlando, a salon his wife managed, and fatally shot three, injuring his wife. In Sioux Falls, S.D., Tyrone Smith strode into the Cost Cutters salon where his girlfriend worked, despite being jailed for domestic violence and under an order of protection and fatally shot the manager. The same year, in suburban Milwaukee, Radcliffe Haughton, who had a long history of violence against his wife and was under an order of protection fatally shot his wife, Zina, and two other women at Azana Salon & Spa in front of horrified customers and employees.
In 2011, Scott Evans Dekraai killed eight including his wife at the Salon Meritage in Orange County. Last year Maria Nunez McDaniel was fatally gunned down at Julia’s Salon Dominican Hair Studio near the Paulding-Cobb county line in Georgia by her husband Robert Steven McDaniel. And last month, Aquilina Nino Garcia who worked at Salonz Beauty Suites in Miami was fatally gunned down by her boyfriend in front of horrified customers and employers.
From Oscar Pistorius to George Zimmerman to Ismaaiyl Brinsley (who fatally shot two New York policemen in December after shooting his girlfriend) gun bullies’ preferred target is often unarmed, defenseless women. The gun bullying even rises into the top NRA ranks.
Thirty-nine guns belonging to the NRA’s own New York City field representative Richard D‘Alauro were confiscated in 2010 after charges of assault, harassment and endangering the welfare of a child charges were filed against him. Luckily, D’Alauro’s order of protection expired and he can again have his 39 guns in case he has to defend himself against bad guys. He “continues to live in fear” says his lawyer, of outrageous charges. Speaking of living in fear, his wife Maribeth testified on Capitol Hill that she endured years of bullying and abuse from the NRA honcho.
It’s no secret that gun advocates are overwhelmingly men and domestic violence victims are overwhelmingly women. Would the NRA still defend the “gun rights” of suspected abusers who are under orders of protection if enraged armed women were regularly blowing away their exes and everyone around them?
Tell the companies you patronize to ban guns the way they ban smoking.
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