I went to lunch with some friends on Sunday. There’s one girl who thinks she knows everything and is always peppering us with stories and factoids to show off. Sunday she throws this nugget out: In domestic killings, the number one weapon used is not guns, but frying pans. This can’t be true, can it? It sounds like something Saturday Night Live would have the NRA saying in a skit. –Hokienautic, via the Straight Dope Message Board
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To believe this bogus stat is to give credence to its bogus implications: Number one, that women commit some huge chunk of domestic murders since presumably it’s women swinging those pans. Number two, that when women do kill their partners, a frying pan is honest to God how they do it. We’ll start with implication number two. According to U.S. Justice Department statistics from 1990 to 2004, when American women decide they’ve had it with the man in their life, they address the situation using “blunt objects” only 2 percent of the time. As one might expect, 69 percent of the time they use a gun. In less gun-happy Canada, 63 percent of women who killed their husbands between 1985 and 1994 stabbed them, 22 percent chose firearms, and 15 percent resorted to beatings or “other.” Death by cookware wasn’t broken out as a separate category, but it’s safe to say there wasn’t a lot.
Still, accumulating research suggests the standard portrayal of women as victims is inaccurate. As far back as the 1970s researchers were reporting that wives and husbands seemed equally likely to resort to physical violence in a conflict. A glance through one compilation of close to 150 studies suggests that rates of domestic violence are roughly comparable between the sexes.
