About Firearms and Lethality
In a Chicago Tribune report published November 8, 2026, reporter Caroline Kubzansky documented a pattern that should trouble anyone who works in domestic violence intervention. The number of people killed in Chicago by a family member or intimate partner has dropped sharply this year, with at least 28 such deaths so far in 2026, a 44 percent drop in domestic homicides compared to the same period in 2025. At the same time, the number of people wounded in nonfatal domestic shootings rose by about 25 percent, to 69, and shootings that wounded more than one person in a domestic setting rose 83 percent. That figure came from Katie Dunne of Chicago77 Charities, who led a city and county task force report on violence against women, and who told the Tribune that the rise in multi-victim shootings "all but explains the rise in nonfatal cases."
Amanda Pyron, executive director of The Network: Advocating Against Domestic Violence, offered the reporting's starkest figure. Citing data from the Department of Justice's Office of Violence Against Women, Pyron said that when firearms are in a home, a survivor is "500% more likely to be murdered." That statistic is sobering on its own. It is also, to anyone trained in structured risk assessment, not a new discovery. It is the kind of finding that has been built into clinical practice for nearly forty years.
In 1986, Jacquelyn Campbell, a nurse researcher who now holds a professorship at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, developed the Danger Assessment, a validated instrument meant to help professionals estimate how much danger an abused woman faces of being killed by her partner. Campbell built the tool with direct input from battered women, shelter workers, law enforcement, and clinical experts on battering. It remains in active clinical and advocacy use today, with English and Spanish versions and formal training available through the instrument's own organization.
The Danger Assessment is a weighted instrument, not a simple yes-or-no checklist. Most of its twenty items contribute equally to a raw count of "yes" answers, but a small number are scored more heavily, because the research behind the tool found them more closely tied to lethal outcomes. Item 2 asks a direct question: "Does he own a gun?" A "yes" answer there adds four points, the single highest weight anywhere on the instrument, matched only by the item asking whether the woman has left her partner after living together in the past year. A separate item, number 5, asks whether he has ever used a weapon against her or threatened her with a lethal weapon, with a follow-up question that specifically flags whether that weapon was a gun. Total scores sort into four bands, from "variable danger" below 8 points up to "extreme danger" at 18 or higher.
It is worth sitting with the fact that a firearm-ownership question sits at the top scoring tier of an instrument built decades before this year's Chicago numbers existed. The relationship Pyron described from current DOJ data was not a new discovery in 2026. It was already understood well enough, by the mid-1980s, to be built into the architecture of a professional risk-assessment tool, one still taught to advocates, nurses, and law enforcement officers today. That is a connection this piece is drawing, not one either the Tribune reporting or the Danger Assessment's own materials state directly.
Two caveats belong here, because this is a tool meant for professional use, not casual self-scoring. First, the Danger Assessment's own documentation states plainly that it "is not a predictive measurement tool." It organizes known risk factors into a structured score. It does not guarantee what will or will not happen in a given case. Second, the instrument's weighted scoring requires training to administer and interpret correctly. Handing a client the form without that training is a misuse of the tool, not a shortcut to using it responsibly.
The Chicago reporting also described Karina's Law, which requires Illinois law enforcement to remove firearms and Firearm Owner's Identification cards from someone named in an order of protection within 96 hours of a related search warrant being issued. Pyron told the Tribune that enforcement of the law is uneven, and that it is implemented more consistently outside Chicago than within it. The Chicago Police Department responded that it prioritizes safe weapon recovery and reviews warrants issued under the law.
This year's apparent improvement is worth placing inside a longer timeline rather than read on its own. A separate analysis on this site in September, drawing on Justin Klawans's reporting for The Week, noted that Chicago's domestic violence deaths rose roughly 15 percent between 2021 and the years leading into 2025, even as the city's overall homicide count fell by nearly half over that same span. Set against that longer run, this year's reported drop in domestic homicides reads less like a reversal of an ongoing problem and more like a single year's data point inside a city where domestic violence deaths had been climbing for several years before it. This is this piece's own reading of how the two data points fit together, not a conclusion either source states.
Read together, these two sets of facts suggest something worth considering, though it is this piece's own reading rather than a conclusion either source draws. A city can see its domestic homicide count fall while its firearm-specific injury count climbs in the same year. That pattern points toward the gap between identifying a known risk factor and acting on it as the place where outcomes may actually be decided, more than toward any uncertainty about what the risk factor is. The Danger Assessment has told a trained professional which question to ask for nearly forty years. Whether the answer to that question changes what happens next, in a given jurisdiction or a given case, is a separate and much harder problem than naming the risk factor itself.
For survivors reading this: if a professional you work with uses a structured tool like the Danger Assessment, the firearm question is not an afterthought in that process. It is one of the two most heavily weighted items on the form, for documented reasons that predate this year's headlines by decades.
Sources:
Source Article: ‘Still so much danger’: Domestic violence homicides down but attacks with guns up, Chicago Tribune, Caroline Kubzansky, November 8, 2026
Research Source: Danger Assessment instrument (official site; English PDF: https://www.dangerassessment.org/uploads/pdf/DAEnglish2010.pdf)
