The Untold Story Of Gun Violence

Without even pulling the trigger, men use deadly weapons to threaten, manipulate, and terrorize their intimate partners. This harrowing form of domestic abuse is called coercive control, and it impacts millions of American women each year.

Not long after Sophie * , now 28, moved into her boyfriend Sam ’ s new house in suburban Illinois, he brought home a gun. It was a pistol, small and black and heavy. “ He was kind of excited, ” she remembers. She didn’t understand why he wanted one—his parents didn’t own guns, that she knew of—but he seemed to be acting responsibly, getting a legal firearms permit, keeping it locked in a gun safe, and storing the bullets separately. And she trusted Sam; he was her high school sweetheart. So she tried to put it out of her mind.

Until he started taking the weapon out at night. It was always when Sam was drunk and they were bickering. Without a word, he’d head into the bedroom, open the safe, and reappear with the gun. Sometimes, he’d place it on the kitchen table; other times, he’d slowly load and unload it in front of her, methodically popping bullets in and out of the chamber. “There were never any verbal threats,” says Sophie. “He’d just…have it out.”

At first, she protested. “I’d be like, ‘Oh god, put that away,’ and he would say, ‘What? Does this make you uncomfortable?’” The next day, Sam would be full of apologies and promises to never take it out again.

Over the next few months, he bought more guns, and the drunken intimidation intensified. He’d point an unloaded weapon at the ceiling and pull the trigger, a practice known as dry firing. Or he’d load one and point it at her or at himself. Sophie would inevitably end up doing whatever Sam wanted, just to get him to put the damn thing away. “It was almost like being held captive,” she says. “In a physical fight, I’d at least have a chance—I could poke him in the eye or knee him in the groin. But when there’s a gun involved, it’s not a level playing field.”