Darryl Varnum, a technology contractor for the Pentagon, is facing federal charges for threatening to kill Florida Democratic Representative Frederica Wilson over a vaccination bill. He’s a gun owner, which police knew, as they’d been called to his Maryland home by his wife in 2015. His wife told county sheriff’s deputies at the time that he owned “numerous guns,” though he only had one registered in his name, and the deputies found him in his garage with a rifle and a bottle of vodka, claiming members of the Taliban were on their way.

Many things about this are unsurprising: the fact that police encountered a white man, drunk with a gun, and took him to a hospital for a mental health evaluation rather than arresting or shooting him; the fact that neither Varnum’s direct employer, Sealing Technology, nor the Defense Information Systems Agency, have commented on that 2015 encounter or whether or not they will still employ Varnum; the fact that on his Facebook page, Varnum compared vaccinations to the Holocaust; the fact that a violent, unstable American man felt such liberty threatening to kill a woman of color that he said in his voicemail to Wilson, “I hope the fucking FBI, CIA, and everybody else hears this shit.” Perhaps the only surprising thing is that the federal government cared enough about a woman of color to press charges in this case.

Varnum hasn’t and likely won’t have his ability to own guns curtailed. Under Maryland state law it’s impossible to get someone’s gun rights curtailed unless an individual such as one in Varnum’s position has been confined to a mental hospital for over 30 days or there’s an actual conviction for a felony—a major source of frustration for both gun control and domestic violence victims’ advocates.

Living with an unstable, angry partner with access to guns is notoriously unsafe for American women.

There’s no reported record of Varnum ever having been violent with his wife, though she was the one who called the police about him in 2015. This sort of scenario, however, is exactly the type many victims’ and gun control advocates say ought to provoke some sort of review of an individual’s gun licenses. Living with an unstable, angry partner with access to guns is notoriously unsafe for American women. In the U.S., a woman is shot by a current or former partner every 16 hours. Guns make domestic violence situations far more fatal: Victims are five times more likely to be killed if their abuser has access to a gun. Abusers often use guns to control and coerce victims, even when they never pull the trigger.

Criminologists and security experts have also started focusing on early, domestically reported cases, because the danger posed by violent individuals isn’t limited to their spouses, partners, and exes: Out of 46 mass shootings from 2015 through 2017, more than half of the perpetrators had a known history of domestic violence. As Melissa Jeltsen, a HuffPost reporter who covers domestic violence wrote in 2017, “It’s worth noting the connection, as researchers have identified the key warning signs of abusers who are likely to kill in the future. They share remarkably similar traits: They have histories of strangling their partners, stalking and death threats. And, crucially, they have access to firearms.”