Researchers cite firearm availability as key factor in family killings
At least 17 family-annihilation killings have occurred in the United States so far this year, up from six such attacks across all of 2025, according to data compiled by Northeastern University and reported by the Guardian. The sharp rise reverses what had been the lowest annual tally in at least two decades.
Researchers who study family homicides point to the United States’ high rate of gun ownership and easy firearm access as distinguishing factors that turn potentially non-lethal disputes into mass killings. “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,” said Jacquelyn Campbell, a Johns Hopkins University professor of nursing who has studied domestic violence homicide.
Several recent attacks have unfolded across multiple states. 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. The father of two of the children killed, Brad Ireland, 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. McFarland had previously been charged with child endangerment resulting in a death, neglect or abandonment, armed robbery and burglary, and fraud, WQAD reported. 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.
Researchers describe several recurring triggers — family estrangement, financial stress, marital disputes and, particularly, recent divorce or separation. “Often in the intimate partner situation, it involves things like jealousy and just the kind of psychic pain involved in suicidal crisis overall,” said Katherine Keyes, an epidemiology professor at Columbia University and author of a 2025 murder-suicide study.
The rates of intimate partner violence are similar across high-income countries, according to a study published in the Lancet, but gun ownership and gun deaths are significantly higher in the United States. When a domestic abuser has access to a firearm, the victim is five times more likely to be killed, according to a study in the American Journal of Public Health. 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; in the United Kingdom, which has stricter gun laws and a lower rate of firearm ownership, the comparable 2021 rate was 0.7 per 1,000 females. There does not appear to be significant research examining familicide rates in the United States versus other countries.
“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,” said Doreen Dodgen-Magee, a psychologist whose sister-in-law and three nieces were shot and killed by her brother-in-law. Three decades ago, her sister-in-law and nieces had left their home because they no longer felt safe living with her brother-in-law. Despite a restraining order against him, he was able to purchase a gun and drove to Dodgen-Magee’s mother-in-law’s house, where he killed his wife and children. Dodgen-Magee said she believes a red-flag law and a measure requiring the gun’s vendor to run a background check could have prevented the shooting. Reducing access to lethal means is “one of the most effective and evidence-based suicide prevention and violence prevention interventions,” Keyes said.
Twenty-two states have red-flag laws, which 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. 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.
The National Rifle Association previously expressed support for red-flag laws but later reversed its position. NRA lobbyist Randy Kozuch wrote in a Daily Caller column that such laws “strip away gun owners’ rights without due process.” Nathan Dahm, a Republican lawmaker in Oklahoma, who sponsored the country’s first anti-red-flag law, represents a state with among the nation’s highest suicide rates. When the Trace asked Dahm about the connection between firearms and suicide and a colleague who had killed himself with a gun, Dahm said: “Everyone dies. That’s life.”
Research has linked red-flag laws to reductions in firearm suicides. A January study in JAMA Health Forum examined four states that passed such laws and eight that did not and found that they reduced firearm suicides by an average of 3.79 incidents per 100,000 people.
Dodgen-Magee, who advocates for stricter gun safety laws, rejected the argument that firearms help people protect themselves. Given the number of firearms in the United States, “if that were true, we would be the safest country to live in,” she said.
Dodgen-Magee said the experience still affects her decades later. “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 said. “It’s easy to dismiss these crimes because you just think, oh, that was a messed-up family. 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.”