Estella Segovia is finally able to talk about being swallowed into a long-running nightmare of domestic violence.

It's a nightmare that Dallas City Hall wants to go away. Hopefully, under some little-noticed changes, you'll hear fewer stories like this one.

Estella was married to a man who would knock her to the ground at parties and kick her in the face in front of her young daughter. He alternated between tearing up her property and threatening to kill her. He once pinned her to the floor and covered her face with a pillow.

Years into this abusive cycle, Estella, then 36, filed for divorce and secured a protective order. Her husband responded by showing up with a gun at the home where she was staying with family and firing 14 shots into the house after Estella refused to leave with him.

The wife of one of her cousins, asleep at the time, lost her left eye in the rampage — the finale of his horror show. Estella’s ex-spouse is serving 99 years in prison for the shooting.

Estella knows that many who hear her story can’t fathom why she stayed in the relationship for so long. But as a victim of abuse as a child, she genuinely believed that being beaten up was part of the marriage contract.

She credits her now sturdy outlook to good therapy and the support of The Family Place. But any time she re-tells her story, “I have to go back to that time and, for a moment, I feel that helplessness again.”

I spoke with Estella about her nightmare after I saw some new hope in last week’s council Public Safety & Criminal Justice Committee meeting.

Deadly Affection: A yearlong examination of domestic violence deaths in North Texas

For domestic abuse victims, City Hall, under Mayor Mike Rawlings' leadership, is drawing a new battle line. By the end of October, municipal courts will begin reporting to the state the identities and fingerprints of all people who are found guilty or plead no contest to Class C misdemeanor family violence charges.

These incidents are the lowest-level offenses. Class C cases involve verbal threats or physical contact that did not result in visible injury. No one walks away with more than a $500 ticket. About 2,200 such cases came through the Dallas courts in the last three to four years.

The state will forward the information to the FBI for its National Crime Information Center, the database for background checks to obtain a firearm.

This isn’t part of some new restriction — it’s what Second Amendment advocates have long advocated: enforcing the laws that are already on the books. Under federal law, any family violence proceeding — whether a Class C misdemeanor, a protective order or a felony — prevents the guilty party from purchasing a weapon. The old system in Dallas allows low-level bad actors to escape that consequence. Closing the loophole is exceedingly sensible and long overdue.

Jennifer Staubach Gates, who leads the Domestic Violence Task Force, told me that last November’s massacre at a Sutherland Springs church is a grim reminder of why cities must do everything possible. A prior court-martial conviction for domestic assault against the church gunman, Devin Kelley, was not sent to civilian law enforcement, preventing it from appearing in FBI databases. The Air Force acknowledged that the information would have prevented gun sales to Kelley.

“I don’t want on my conscience that I didn’t do what I could to make sure some dude who slapped around his wife still got a gun and went on to kill a bunch of people,” Gates said. “If the city can make a difference in stopping violence, then yes, let’s follow the federal law and send that information to DPS.”

Right now, San Antonio is the only other Texas city doing something similar. So the Dallas task force, which pushed for the change, is leading a lobbying effort for state legislation that would require all cities to incorporate the Class C reporting into databases.

Dallas council members previously approved $45,000 to buy three Live Scan Fingerprinting systems needed to secure info for the database. That expense barely garners any attention in a city like Dallas, but it could be an issue in smaller municipalities, so Gates is interested in whether private funding could close that gap.

Whatever the Legislature decides, getting Class C violators from Dallas immediately into the federal database is the right thing to do. Of the eight women who died in this county last year at the hands of an intimate partner, five of them were shot to death.

If nothing else, maybe someone will think twice about treating a spouse badly if the consequence is never owning a gun. And recording the offenses could help enhance charges against repeat offenders.

This latest strategy feels a lot more achievable than the last headline-making one: the local weapons surrender program for those convicted of domestic abuse. Although advocates initially hoped the effort would lead to thousands of guns being turned in, judges have been able to secure only about 140 weapons since 2015.

Assistant District Attorney Jerry Varney says those results aren’t surprising given that the courts often have no way to know independently whether the abuser has a gun. So confiscation hinges on the word of the abuser. “Anyone who is down here regularly knows people lie very easily in court,” Varney told me.

As the task force struggles to put more teeth into the gun surrender initiative, the Class C reporting strategy can make a difference almost immediately.

Domestic violence survivor Estella Segovia and her family might not have been spared the violence that ensued had the new system been in place. But she believes for others like her who have or will endure a violent partner, getting Class C offenses into the national database is huge. “If a person loses control and they are willing to lift their hand, their foot against you, to throw something at you, why wouldn’t they also make the choice to use a firearm?”