The United States has an epidemic of gun violence.  Each year, more than 30,000 people are killed by firearms.  More than half of those are the result of firearm related suicides.  Discussions about gun control often center on reducing the numbers of firearm related deaths.  Lost in that discussion, however, is that many people have had their lives irrevocably altered by firearms.  They may not have died, but they have been affected by the gun violence in the US.  Here is the story of one such survivor, Kate Ranta:

I didn’t grow up in a house with guns. I never dated anybody who had guns. I wasn’t anti-gun – it just wasn’t part of my upbringing. But my abusive husband was a major in the Air Force, so he had been around guns. He had a lot of them.

We were married in March 2008. In January 2011, I got a restraining order after a domestic-violence incident. He was asked if he would voluntarily give up his guns, to which he said no. But they were able to seize them, and I subsequently dropped the restraining order.

[My then husband] should have never been able to get his hands on a gun. Because he had a prior order against him and he had been arrested for violating it, that should’ve been enough to not get a gun, but he did. In states that require background checks for every handgun sale, 38 percent fewer women are shot by intimate partners. The presence of a gun in a domestic-violence incident increases the chance of homicide for women by 500 percent. 500 percent. Even after what happened to me, I respect the Second Amendment, but there need to be background checks.

(the story of Kate Ranta is part of a series entitled America’s Gun Violence Epidemic by Rolling Stone)