Intimate partner shooting deaths are soaring — especially since the pandemic. In a new story about how existing laws leave lethal loopholes for domestic violence victims, Reveal News and The Guardian obtained previously unpublished FBI data showing that gun homicides by intimate partners are at their highest levels since the mid-90s. While there’s been a steady 58-percent total increase in the last decade, 2020 alone saw a 25-percent spike over 2019. Women accounted for over two-thirds of intimate partner gun homicide victims in 2020. Many of those killings were committed by people who weren’t allowed to possess guns under federal law: Reveal obtained data from 21 states that included at least 110 cases from 2017 through 2020, suggesting the nationwide total could be much higher. The FBI data, also analyzed by Northeastern University professor and criminologist James Alan Fox, shows that more than 122,000 Americans have died by the hands of their intimate partners since 1976; 2,800 of those happened in 2020, which the story labels “an especially lethal period for abuse victims.” Related from The Trace: Ann Givens wrote about how firearms restrictions aren’t automatically included in temporary orders of protection in many states.