,
17 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
1/ It’s hard to predict who will commit a horrifying act like a mass shooting. But there’s often one common thread: domestic violence.
2/ The church shooting that killed 26 people in Sutherland Springs, Texas, is the latest example. 
3/ Officials in Texas say the shooting may have been motivated by a domestic dispute. bit.ly/2zf2X9v
4/ Before the shooting, police say, gunman Devin Patrick Kelley sent “threatening texts” to his mother-in-law, a member of the church.
5/ And while he was in the US Air Force, Kelley assaulted his wife and stepson and was sentenced to a year in military prison.
6/ He isn’t the only one. Starting in 2010, James Alex Fields Jr.'s mother called 911 multiple times, saying Fields hit & threatened her.
7/ In August, Fields drove into a crowd of counterprotesters in Charlottesville, killing one person and wounding more.
8/ In 2006, James Hodgkinson was accused of grabbing his daughter by her hair and trying to choke her, according to police records.
9/ Hodgkinson opened fire on a congressional baseball practice this summer, critically injuring House Majority Whip Steve Scalise.
10/ In 1992, Robert Lewis Dear was arrested and charged with sexual assault and rape. Two of his ex-wives also accused him of abuse.
11/ Dear shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado in 2015, killing three people.
12/ Omar Mateen’s ex-wife alleged he regularly beat her. In 2016, Matteen murdered 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
13/ Police were dispatched to Esteban Santiago’s Alaska house at least four times in 2016 for domestic violence calls.
14/ In January 2017, Santiago killed 5 people in a shooting at the Fort Lauderdale Airport in Florida.
15/ Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was allegedly abusive toward his wife and was accused of domestic violence in 2009.
16/ Federal law bars those convicted of domestic violence from owning guns. But the law is often poorly enforced. bit.ly/2zjeYe8
17/17 While our attention is often on gun massacres, many more mass shootings take place in the home. bit.ly/2zigey7
