Murder-Suicide Appears to Be Rising Among Older Americans

Most often by men against women

By Jennifer Mascia for The Trace and Chip Brownlee for The Trace

This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

This story was published in collaboration with The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics, policy, and power.

A day after New Year’s, 2025, a 91-year-old man fatally shot his 89-year-old wife in their house in Camarillo, California. He called the police to confess before killing himself. “They were inseparable for the 64 years they were together,” according to the couple’s joint obituary.

Last November in upstate New York, a 69-year-old retiree struggling with his mental health killed his 68-year-old longtime girlfriend and then himself in their home. A neighbor discovered their bodies. “I just don’t know what happened to him,” another neighbor said about the retiree. “He was just a good guy.”

Gun deaths overall have been declining in recent years, but murder-suicides in which at least one of the victims was age 65 or older are higher than ever, according to a Trace analysis of data from the Gun Violence Archive. At least 134 older adults were killed in murder-suicides last year, a slight rise over 2024 and the highest number since GVA began compiling data more than a decade ago. Another 85 older adults perpetrated a killing before dying by their own hand.

GVA tracks shootings through media and police reports, so it may not capture every incident. Still, it is one of the most comprehensive sources of data on gun violence in the United States. The Trace took a closer look at the murder-suicides and whether there are points of intervention for people at risk.

What the Data Shows

There were 679 gun-related murder-suicides in the United States last year. In 144 of them, or 21 percent, at least one victim or perpetrator was 65 or older.

The circumstances behind the murder-suicides of older adults varied. Illness was a motivating factor in at least 15 percent of them. In several cases, the perpetrator was the victim’s full-time caregiver. 

A couple of shootings followed disputes over inheritance. Two other shooters reported financial struggles before pulling the trigger. A few couples left notes saying the decision to die was mutual, but most shootings appeared to be unilateral actions on the part of the shooter. In many cases, the motive will never be known — not even to the families.

In more than half of the cases we examined, the perpetrator fatally shot their spouse or a current or former romantic partner. In just over a quarter, the perpetrator killed their parent or child, or another immediate family member. Family annihilations — in which someone kills multiple members of their immediate family — accounted for 16 percent of the incidents. Over the past two years, family annihilation has become a twice-daily phenomenon in the United States.

Women made up 80 percent of the victims in last year’s murder-suicides among older adults. The oldest victim was 102. Her 75-year-old son-in-law fatally shot her and her 73-year-old daughter in La Porte, Indiana, in May 2025. A neighbor said the victims had health problems and that the son-in-law had been taking care of them.

All but two of the shooters were men. The oldest perpetrator, a 92-year-old man in Mesa, Arizona, killed his 93-year-old wife and then himself at their senior group home in October. 

Several of the incidents involved couples whose bodies were discovered during welfare checks instigated by neighbors or family members, sometimes days or weeks after the killings. In those cases, a motive was difficult to discern — and in a few cases, police couldn’t even tell who the shooter was.

Only a few cases involved a documented history of domestic abuse. In August last year, a 70-year-old man fatally shot his 69-year-old wife and 40-year-old daughter at their mansion in Rolling Hills, California, before killing himself. The couple was in the middle of a divorce. Both victims had a restraining order against the shooter.

Trump claims his "high IQ" will protect us from being wiped out by artificial intelligence

We're all gonna die

Brad Reed for Common Dreams

Trump loves his AI slop

Donald Trump slapped down the idea of putting guardrails on artificial intelligence, despite increased warnings from industry insiders and outside experts about the technology’s potential dangers to humanity.

In a Truth Social post, Trump suggested that his own intellect was singlehandedly capable of regulating AI, a technology so complicated that even its own creators have acknowledged difficulties in understanding it.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” Trump wrote, “and the USA has that, in spades!”

Trump then claimed, without offering any details, that his administration had already “stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’” and then baselessly claimed the nationwide backlash to the technology was part of a vast conspiracy theory in service of the Chinese Communist Party.

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump wrote. “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”

Regardless of Trump’s social media rants, there is widespread concern about the impacts of AI across the political spectrum.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, described Trump’s stance on regulating AI as “a fundamental incompetence that places us all in grave danger,” in a Common Dreams op-ed.

Reacting directly to Trump’s Monday social media post, Sachs told Common Dreams that it was a sign that “we are in the grip of madness and puerility.”

Trump often cites his academic achievements,
lying about his placement among Wharton
Business School graduates, as proof of his "genius"

Axios reported on Monday that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will join former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and former Anthropic AI researcher Jacob Coxon on Tuesday for a what is being described as a “Pro-Human Assembly” aimed at highlighting the dangers posed by the continued development of the technology.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), chair of Senate Subcommittee on Disaster Management, announced last week that he is opening a probe into the recent autonomous hack carried out by OpenAI agents, while also examining threats posed by the AI industry as a whole.

Calls to regulate AI have grown over the last week since Coxon announced that he had resigned from his position at AI lab Anthropic because he no longer felt it was possible to safely develop the technology.

In a social media post announcing his resignation, Coxon claimed that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” and accused them of “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

Meeting an urgent national security need

We'll tell you his weak spot

Taking the stairs could protect your heart and help you live longer

Unless you have a heart attack

University of East Anglia

Simply choosing the stairs could have surprisingly big benefits for your heart and longevity. A large analysis involving more than 480,000 people found that regular stair climbers were 39% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and 24% less likely to die from any cause than people who rarely took the stairs. They also had lower risks of heart attack, stroke, and heart failure.

New research from the University of East Anglia and the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital suggests that something as simple as choosing the stairs could contribute to a longer life.

The large study found that people who regularly climbed stairs had a substantially lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. Frequent stair climbers were 39% less likely to die from heart-related causes and 24% less likely to die from any cause compared with people who climbed stairs less often.

Regular stair climbing was also associated with a lower likelihood of developing serious cardiovascular conditions, including heart attack, stroke, and heart failure.

Prof Vassilios Vassiliou, from UEA's Norwich Medical School, said: "Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide -- with cases nearly doubling between 1990 and 2019. But it is largely preventable through a healthy lifestyle -- including regular physical activity, a heart-healthy diet, not smoking, maintaining a healthy weight, and managing blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes.

"Taking the stairs is a practical and often overlooked way to build physical activity into daily life.

"We wanted to better understand how this everyday activity could have life-saving potential."

Are too many Americans taking antidepressants?

These days, who ISN'T depressed?

Andrew McLean, University of North Dakota

How can you take Bobby Junior seriously when
he posts this shit?

Drugs for treating depression are among the most prescribed category of medications in the U.S. – 1 in 6 American adults take them.

Some health researchers and advocates have raised concerns that too many patients are using antidepressants and that patients who want to stop taking them struggle to do so. 

One of the most prominent voices on this point is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who launched an effort in May 2026 encouraging doctors to find other ways besides antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs to treat depression when possible.

As a psychiatrist for over 35 years, including a past role as the medical director of North Dakota’s Department of Human Services, I’ve seen both the benefits and the problems with antidepressants. In my view, there are grains of truth to claims that they are overused, but the full picture is much more nuanced.

There’s a name for working families who are surviving but not thriving in Rhode Island: ALICE

Remember when they were called the working poor?

By Janine L. Weisman, Rhode Island Current

In her neon yellow shirt and pink hard hat, Ashlynn Jorge extended her arm and held her palm out to halt traffic approaching a sidewalk construction site on Kay Street in Newport shortly before 10 o’clock Thursday morning.

But the 26-year-old union laborer can’t stop the bills. 

South County numbers are lower

Jorge earns about $4,800 a month. But rent for the three-bedroom house in East Providence where she lives with her boyfriend and their two children, ages 6, and 3, is $2,500 a month. The lease on her Hyundai Palisade is $767 a month. Food, utilities and other expenses eat up the rest of her income.

It costs less for her boyfriend, also 26, to stay home and take care of their son and daughter than for him to work and pay for childcare, she said.

“Live paycheck to paycheck,” said Jorge, who gets up each workday at 4:30 a.m. “I try to give my kids what they deserve, so I try my best to work overtime sometimes.” 

The gap between earnings and the cost of basic living is the focus of a new report from the United Way of Rhode Island released Thursday morning at the same time Jorge and her coworkers were rebuilding a section of sidewalk.

Jorge’s income is well over the $33,000 federal poverty threshold for a household of four. But that still means her family is among the 1 in 3 Rhode Island households working and struggling to afford adequate food, housing and health care, unable to save money for the future.

There’s a name for these households: ALICE.

Trump regime lets sales of sawed-off shotguns and silencers become legal

Just in time for fall hunting season

By Chip Brownlee for The Trace

Silencers and short-barreled firearms like sawed-off shotguns have been heavily regulated under the National Firearms Act for nearly a century. That just changed.

Under the NFA, enacted in 1934, owners of silencers, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, and some other atypical weapons were required to register their guns with the federal government and undergo more extensive vetting. On August 5, a federal judge in Texas, James Wesley Hendrix, found the registration requirements unconstitutional and issued an injunction blocking the provision. He gave the Trump administration a week to appeal.

The Justice Department missed that deadline. So on August 13, the special regulations on silencers (also known as suppressors) and short-barreled guns were effectively scrapped for the first time in more than 90 years. 

Gun rights proponents cheered the decision. In Texas, far-right congressional candidate Brandon Herrera — known online as TheAKGuy — was among the first to buy a legal, unregistered silencer just after midnight at an event organized by Gun Owners of America. Hours later, in South Carolina, the National Association for Gun Rights posted a video claiming silencers were “flying off the shelves” at the Greenville store of Palmetto State Armory, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

Great things to look forward to

ProPublica reveals Putin ties to the money that funded Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding

From ProPublica:

ICE Hired Unqualified Goons After ‘Unprecedented Lowering of Standards’

Why so many are being killed and injured

Brad Reed for Common Dreams   

A whistleblower is claiming that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has dangerously lowered its hiring standards for new recruits, who were given final job offers without undergoing even preliminary vetting.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that the whistleblower, who has worked at ICE for 17 years, filed a complaint in August 2025 with the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Homeland Security that sounded alarms about what he described as an “unprecedented lowering of standards” for hiring.

According to the complaint, applicants were offered jobs before they even passed fingerprint and identity checks, which the whistleblower said created “grave national security risks” for the agency.

In an interview with the Times, the whistleblower said that ICE “chose... to be more convenient rather than thorough,” even though “there was a potential to put lives at risk and jeopardize national security.”

This is at least the second whistleblower complaint to raise concerns about the deterioration of standards at ICE.

In February, former ICE lawyer Ryan Schwank alleged in a complaint that he “received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant.”

Schwank also alleged that “the legally required training program at the ICE academy is deficient, defective, and broken,” which he warned “can and will get people killed.”

ICE’s hiring standards came under scrutiny this summer after it was revealed that ICE agent David Brouillette, who fatally shot a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant named Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, had a lengthy history of allegedly abusive behavior.

Bug alert: RI still at high risk for West Nile Virus

Democrats Demand Trump Administration Halt Collection of Patients’ ER Records

The Trump war on privacy expanded to emergency rooms

By Amanda Seitz, Maia Rosenfeld, and Darius Tahir

A group of Democratic lawmakers is calling for the Trump administration to suspend a new surveillance program it quietly launched to collect the personal and identifiable health data of Americans who visit emergency rooms.

KFF Health News first reported that the Consumer Product Safety Commission — a federal agency tasked with monitoring injuries from household items — was pressuring hospitals to provide a private company with personally identifiable health information for analysis. The rollout of the program has inspired broad pushback from hospitals and privacy advocates.

The CPSC’s goal is to obtain millions of Americans’ medical records from emergency rooms for most injuries, even when a consumer product is not involved, internal emails and documents reviewed by KFF Health News revealed. The agency instructed hospitals to share detailed patient information for more than 10,000 types of injuries or conditions, such as vaccine reactions, suicide attempts, or stingray stabs.

The scope of data CPSC is collecting far exceeds the agency’s mission and should be immediately suspended, Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, who sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and other House and Senate Democrats wrote in a letter to CPSC acting Chairman Peter Feldman.

U.S. Postal Service Failed to Properly Handle Some Ballots During This Year’s Primary Elections, Audit Finds

Already it begins

By Jen Fifield for ProPublica

Some U.S. Postal Service facilities failed to properly handle ballots during this year’s primary elections, according to a new audit from the agency’s Office of Inspector General. Election experts say the findings call into question the agency’s ability to meet even greater demands for the November election that are under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The audit, which is dated Sept. 4 but has not been previously reported, found a lack of training for post office staff on how to properly and expeditiously handle mail ballots, deficiencies in how ballots were tracked and errors leading to delays, all of which risked ballots having incorrect postmarks or otherwise arriving late to election officials, which could lead to their rejection. 

The identified failures increase “the risk that Election and Political Mail is not handled, documented, monitored, and reported in accordance with Postal Service policy,” the audit said, though it noted that “most facilities we visited generally adhered to Postal Service’s election-related policies and procedures” and that nearly 99% of ballots reached election officials in a timely manner.

Is It Socialism Or Just Common Sense?

Take a look behind the red-baiting rhetoric

By Chuck Collins 

The debate over capitalism vs. socialism often looks like a battle of cartoon caricatures: Monopoly Man versus the Marx Monster.

Across the planet there are countless flavors of capitalism and socialism, unique mashups of free markets and government policies. Into this muddle wade the right-wing ideologues who fear the red “socialist” demon hiding in every corner.

If Fox News existed in the 1950s, they would’ve labeled Republican President Dwight Eisenhower a socialist for taxing the wealthy and making broad public investments to expand homeownership, enable debt-free higher education, and build infrastructure and technology that expanded the modern middle class.

Yet, what do these labelers call modern-day China, a country that mints hundreds of billionaires a year and dominates global markets with private production? Are they socialist or capitalist?

Meanwhile, social democracies, like Canada and the northern European countries, have progressive tax systems and strong social safety nets. Sweden, with its generous welfare state, has higher rates of entrepreneurship than the United States.

These countries also have higher rates of social mobility than the United States — meaning it’s easier for lower-income people to escape poverty and become stable. The American Dream, apparently, has moved offshore.

These welfare states, with their higher taxes on the wealthy, exist comfortably alongside healthy market economies. However, in the United States, whenever a politician proposes that billionaires pay their fair share of taxes so we make public investments in opportunities for everyone else, they are labeled socialist or even communist.