Fatal Loopholes: Why Gun Control Laws Fail Black Women in Abusive Relationships

In April 2026, Dr. Cerina Wanzer Fairfax was shot and killed by her husband while their divorce proceedings were pending. She had followed every prescribed legal step to ensure her safety. She had initiated the formal process to leave Justin Fairfax, the former lieutenant governor of Virginia. Unfortunately, these cautious legal maneuvers did not save her life. The tragedy that befell Dr. Wanzer Fairfax is not an isolated incident of bad luck; it is part of a systemic failure known as femicide. Femicide refers to the intentional killing of women based on their gender. Statistical evidence shows that women are most frequently murdered by their current partners, former partners, or other individuals who believe they have a claim over a woman’s autonomy. These violent acts occur in domestic spaces such as living rooms and driveways, and they frequently happen during the transitional periods of marriage, divorce, separation, or in the weeks immediately after a woman escapes an abusive environment.

As a scholar focused on the intersection of firearm violence and intimate partner homicide, I examine the policy and structural conditions that determine who is at risk. These examinations reveal where prevention efforts are falling short. Intimate partner homicide does not affect all women equally. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women have the highest rates of homicide by an intimate partner in the nation. This disparity highlights a critical gap in public safety protections.

A 2024 study published in The Lancet tracked homicide deaths from 1999 to 2020. The data found that Black women ages 25 to 44 are killed at nearly four times the rate of their white peers. The spring of 2026 saw three such cases make national headlines, highlighting the severity of this crisis. Just prior to Wanzer Fairfax’s death, Vice Mayor Nancy Metayer Bowen of Coral Springs, Florida, was shot to death, allegedly by her husband. Also in April, in Louisiana, Shaneiqua Pugh was shot by her husband. Christina Snow, the mother of three of the killer’s children, was also shot. While Pugh and Snow are expected to survive, eight children were killed in that incident. Three cases, three states, one month. All were sadly preventable.

Intimate partner homicide claims more than 1,800 lives in the United States every year. Nearly half of these victims are killed by a current or former intimate male partner, not a stranger. These are not random acts of violence. Separation is one of the most dangerous times in an abusive relationship. We cannot view the death of Wanzer Fairfax and others like her as isolated tragedies. Instead, they represent a decades-long pattern of intimate partner femicide in Black relationships. This pattern is driven by firearm access coupled with inadequate policy enforcement.

Guns are what make intimate partner violence so deadly. About half of the roughly 1,800 annual intimate partner femicide cases involved a gun. In every region of the country, firearm homicide disproportionately kills Black women. The presence of a firearm in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of fatal outcomes by five times. Therefore, if the gun is what escalates the risk, it is also where policy has its best chance to intervene. State law can explicitly restrict perpetrators of domestic violence from purchasing or possessing firearms through two types of civil protection orders: final domestic violence restraining orders and temporary restraining orders. Research demonstrates that states with strong gun restrictions along these lines have meaningfully lower rates of intimate partner homicide.