Disarm All Domestic Abusers Now [View all]

[applegrove]

Katie McDonough at Fusion

http://fusion.kinja.com/disarm-all-domestic-abusers-now-1796101206?utm_campaign=socialflow_fusion_facebook&utm_source=fusion_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

"SNIP...........


Soon after this information was made public, journalists began the familiar task of puzzling out who he was and how he could do what he did. We learned that Hodgkinson was 66 years old. He was from Illinois and volunteered for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. He used Facebook to rage about taxes and Republicans, and was apparently the kind of person who shared memes about treason.

As I read each report, I searched them for two words: domestic violence. I do this because of a sentence I can recite for you from memory: Most mass shootings in this country are related to some kind of domestic or family violence. It is almost always there, somewhere in the shooter’s history. And it was again this time, as confirmed by the Daily Beast:


Hodgkinson also had a history of violence. In 2006, he was arrested for domestic battery and discharge of a firearm after he punched a man’s girlfriend “in the face with a closed fist,” according to a sheriff’s office report reviewed by The Daily Beast. When the man walked outside of the residence, Hodgkinson aimed a shotgun at him and later fired one round.

Hodgkinson was also “observed throwing” an unidentified minor “around the bedroom,” the report said. Police identified the girl as his daughter. After the girl broke free, Hodgkinson followed and “started hitting her arms, pulling her hair, and started grabbing her off the bed.”

When Hodgkinson’s girlfriend tried to leave in a vehicle, he reached inside and “turned off the ignition,” the report said. “James then pulled out a possible pocket knife and cut [her] seatbelt.”

The charges were dismissed, according to court records.

............SNIP"