Summary

  • Researchers studying family homicides link the 2026 rise in US familicides — at least 17 events through September versus six in all of 2025, per Northeastern University data reported by the Guardian — to firearm availability during domestic disputes.
  • Johns Hopkins professor Jacquelyn Campbell, Columbia epidemiology professor Katherine Keyes, and psychologist Doreen Dodgen-Magee attribute US case lethality to firearm access, citing Lancet findings that intimate-partner violence rates are comparable across high-income countries while gun ownership and gun deaths are significantly higher in the United States.
  • A JAMA Health Forum study found red-flag laws in four states reduced firearm suicides by 3.79 incidents per 100,000 people, while 22 states have enacted such laws and six majority-Republican states have passed bans on the orders with three more considering such legislation.
  • Documented attacks in Billings, Montana, Muscatine, Iowa, and Texas show warning signs preceded killings, and prior criminal charges or restraining orders did not close firearm access to flagged perpetrators in the McFarland and Dodgen-Magee cases.

At least 17 family-annihilation killings — events in which a perpetrator kills four or more family members — have occurred in the United States so far in 2026, up from six such events in all of 2025, according to Northeastern University data reported by the Guardian on September 19, 2026. The 2026 tally reverses what had been the lowest annual count in at least two decades. Researchers who study family homicides point to firearm access during domestic disputes as the distinguishing factor that turns potentially non-lethal conflicts into multi-victim fatalities. Recurring triggers identified in the research include family estrangement, financial stress, marital disputes and, particularly, recent divorce or separation. The policy response has fractured along partisan lines — 22 states have enacted red-flag laws while six majority-Republican states have passed bans on those orders and three more are considering such legislation.

Firearm access as the cited factor

Researchers studying family homicides have linked the lethality of such attacks to the United States’ high rate of gun ownership and the relative ease of firearm access during domestic disputes, the Guardian reported. Johns Hopkins University professor of nursing Jacquelyn Campbell, who has studied domestic violence homicide, told the newspaper: “There are way too many guns around and easy to pick up, and when someone is in some sort of a rage place, guns get picked up in anger.” Columbia University epidemiology professor Katherine Keyes, author of a 2025 murder-suicide study, attributed the lethality to the kind of “psychic pain involved in suicidal crisis overall,” with jealousy and intimate-partner dynamics as common triggers. Psychologist Doreen Dodgen-Magee, whose sister-in-law and three nieces were shot and killed by her brother-in-law three decades ago, told the Guardian: “There is a particular lethality and a particular impulsivity and a particular level of threat that occurs when a firearm is present, and right now in America we have more firearms than people.” Keyes characterized reducing access to lethal means as “one of the most effective and evidence-based suicide prevention and violence prevention interventions.”

Recurring triggers and documented cases

Researchers describe several recurring triggers across the documented incidents — family estrangement, financial stress, marital disputes and, particularly, recent divorce or separation. Three recent cases cited in the reporting illustrate that sequence. In Billings, Montana, in August, Alan Smith fatally shot four generations of his family at a Sunday dinner weeks after his parents had asked him to move out, according to the Associated Press. Brad Ireland, the father of two of the children killed, told the AP that Smith had been verbally abusive and a hermit. “There were many red flags and many people spoke out,” Ireland said. “No one listened.” In June, in Muscatine, Iowa, Ryan McFarland shot and killed his wife and five family members before killing himself, according to local television stations WQAD-TV and KWQC. WQAD reported that McFarland had previously been charged with child endangerment resulting in a death, neglect or abandonment, armed robbery and burglary, and fraud. His brother Jonathan McFarland, the sole surviving family member, told KWQC: “I just wanted to say that I will forever love and miss my mom, Lesa, my sister, Ryle, my four brothers, Dakota, Austin, Mark and Ryan.” A shooting this week in Texas killed four adults in a family that had taken in the alleged shooter, the Guardian reported.

The Billings, Muscatine and Dodgen-Magee cases, taken together, document a recurring sequence: warning signs were identified by family or community members; no formal intervention was triggered; a firearm was accessible to the perpetrator; and the outcome was multi-victim fatality.

Comparative context

A study published in the Lancet, cited in the article, found that rates of intimate-partner violence are similar across high-income countries, but gun ownership and gun deaths are significantly higher in the United States. A study in the American Journal of Public Health, also cited in the article, found that when a domestic abuser has access to a firearm, the victim is five times more likely to be killed. World Bank Group data cited by the Guardian put the United States’ intentional homicide rate for women at 2.6 per 1,000 females in 2023; the United Kingdom’s comparable 2021 rate was 0.7 per 1,000 females — figures the Guardian presented in per-1,000 units, though comparable statistics are conventionally reported per 100,000. The United Kingdom has stricter gun laws and a lower rate of firearm ownership than the United States. There does not appear to be significant research examining familicide rates in the United States versus other countries, according to the Guardian.

Policy state and partisan divergence

Red-flag laws allow family members or law enforcement to petition a judge for an emergency order temporarily removing firearms from a person found to be at risk of harming themselves or others. Twenty-two states have enacted such laws. A January study in JAMA Health Forum examined four states that passed such laws and eight that did not and found that the laws reduced firearm suicides by an average of 3.79 incidents per 100,000 people. Six states have passed bans on such protective orders and three more are considering such legislation, according to the Trace, a news organization that covers gun violence. All nine are majority-Republican states.

Four intervention candidates appear in the substrate: red-flag law expansion; red-flag law reversal; background-check reinforcement, named by Dodgen-Magee as a measure she believes could have prevented the killing of her sister-in-law and three nieces; and a defer-and-monitor posture tied to the absent cross-national familicide research base. Of those four, the red-flag law expansion path has the strongest substrate-documented evidence base — though that evidence is for the adjacent outcome of firearm suicides, not familicide specifically. The reporting does not include state-level familicide-specific outcome data for any of the four intervention candidates.

Stakeholder positions and documented contradictions

On one side, researchers at Johns Hopkins and Columbia, as quoted in the reporting, have called for policy responses addressing firearm availability. Dodgen-Magee, who advocates for stricter gun safety laws, told the Guardian she believes a red-flag law and a measure requiring the gun’s vendor to run a background check could have prevented the killing of her sister-in-law and three nieces. She characterized the policy stakes: “It is everyone’s family. It is everyone’s town, and until we do some things to protect women and children, it will continue to be.” Rejecting the argument that firearms help people protect themselves, Dodgen-Magee said that given the number of firearms in the United States, “if that were true, we would be the safest country to live in.”

On the opposing side, National Rifle Association lobbyist Randy Kozuch wrote in a Daily Caller column that red-flag laws “strip away gun owners’ rights without due process.” Nathan Dahm, a Republican Oklahoma lawmaker who sponsored the country’s first anti-red-flag law, told the Trace: “Everyone dies. That’s life.” The article identifies Oklahoma as a state with among the nation’s highest suicide rates; CDC 2024 age-adjusted data put Oklahoma at 20.9 suicides per 100,000 population, ranking the state eighth nationally. The National Rifle Association previously expressed support for red-flag laws and later reversed its position; the article does not document what factors drove the reversal. The Guardian reporting does not surface perspectives from firearm manufacturers, domestic-violence shelter operators, law-enforcement officers who would execute red-flag orders, or surviving child survivors of familicide events beyond the quoted statements from Ireland and Jonathan McFarland.

Evidentiary gaps and structural tensions

The substrate frames an evidence-base asymmetry: the means-side research on firearm access and red-flag-law outcomes is comparative, while trigger-side research on estrangement, financial stress and marital disputes is descriptive, with no substrate-cited policy interventions associated with reductions in those trigger variables. The Billings case — in which the perpetrator’s parents had asked him to move out weeks before the attack — illustrates a structural tension in the red-flag mechanism as the article documents it: the law depends on family-member petition at a moment when estrangement, identified by researchers as a recurring trigger, may have eroded the relationships that would initiate such a petition. In the McFarland and Dodgen-Magee cases, prior criminal charges in McFarland’s case and a restraining order in Dodgen-Magee’s brother-in-law’s case did not close firearm access to individuals already flagged by the civil and criminal systems. In the nine majority-Republican states pursuing bans on the protective orders, the JAMA Health Forum evidence has not produced legislative convergence; the article documents this without characterizing its drivers.

How the reporting is being framed

The reporting’s framing centers firearm access as the distinguishing factor between the United States and peer high-income countries, citing the Lancet comparison of intimate-partner-violence rates and the World Bank and Guardian homicide-rate figures. The substrate frames the state-level divergence as a three-direction choice — whether to expand, maintain, or ban the specific intervention the research identifies as effective — with twenty-two states having enacted red-flag laws and nine majority-Republican states moving toward or having enacted bans. The defer-and-monitor intervention candidate — building the cross-national familicide research base the substrate identifies as missing — is the candidate that addresses the underlying evidentiary gap rather than the proximate mechanism; the substrate does not document any such research in progress.

What happens next

The Northeastern University tally, which the Guardian reporting cites without naming an accompanying researcher at the institution, will continue to update through year-end and forms the empirical baseline against which researchers and policymakers measure the 2026 trend. The JAMA Health Forum evidence on firearm-suicide reductions is the strongest substrate-cited outcome data available and is the basis on which researchers at Johns Hopkins and Columbia, as quoted in the reporting, have called for firearm-access policy responses. In the nine majority-Republican states where bans on red-flag orders have been enacted or are under consideration, the legislative direction has moved away from the intervention the JAMA Health Forum study found effective on the adjacent firearm-suicide outcome; the reporting does not document whether state-level familicide-specific outcomes have changed in those jurisdictions. The reporting does not include state-level familicide-specific outcome data for any of the four intervention candidates, leaving the cross-state comparison open as the next evidentiary question researchers would need to address.

Documented long-tail effects

Dodgen-Magee described to the Guardian the personal effect that remains decades after her brother-in-law killed her sister-in-law and three nieces: “Every year when I go into schools, when it’s back-to-school season and backpacks are on the wall, my body sort of short shuts down.” She told the Guardian: “It’s easy to dismiss these crimes because you just think, oh, that was a messed-up family. It is everyone’s family.” The reporting documents the case as one in which a restraining order against the perpetrator did not prevent a firearm purchase, a sequence that reappears in the McFarland case, where prior charges did not close firearm access.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Decision Clarity
Articulates the real stakes, stakeholders, and interests behind a decision facing a third party.