摘要：Persons under certain domestic violence restraining orders are prohibited by federal law from purchasing and possessing a firearm. We used administrative data from California to link 794426 restraining orders with 1388724 handgun purchase applications. We found that restrained persons were not a less law-abiding group in general, but they appeared to be repeatedly or serially abusive to intimate partners, and their handgun purchase rates were highest after their restraining orders expired. Intimate partner violence results in nearly 2 million injuries and more than 1500 deaths annually in the United States. 1 , 2 Firearms figure prominently in these assaults: households in which intimate partner violence has occurred may be more likely to contain a handgun than households without incidents of violence, 3 intimate partner assaults involving a firearm are 12 times more likely to result in death than those involving other weapons or bodily force, 4 firearms are the most common weapon in intimate partner homicides, 1 and for women, intimate partner violence is more likely than violence by strangers to result in injuries and deaths. 5 The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act prohibits the purchase and possession of firearms by persons under certain domestic violence restraining orders. 6 (A restraining order, also called a protective or stay-away order, is a court order that limits one person’s behavior to protect another.) A recent ecological study documented a 7% reduction in intimate partner homicides in states with domestic violence restraining order firearm prohibitions. 7 However, the study did not assess how well the laws were implemented and enforced, so the full effect of the law may not have been evident. We examined the history of firearm purchase by individuals under a restraining order and assessed whether existing purchase and possession prohibitions kept firearms out of the hands of batterers.
