In Kabul the other day, an Afghan policewoman shot dead her American police trainer and would’ve shot others, too, if her service pistol hadn’t jammed.
Here’s how Reuters characterized the incident today in a piece titled Mental illness, poverty haunted Afghan policewoman who killed American:
The Afghan policewoman suspected of killing a U.S. contractor at police headquarters in Kabul suffered from mental illness and was driven to suicidal despair by poverty, her children told Reuters on Wednesday. …On the floor beside [her son] were his mother’s prescriptions and a thick plastic bag filled with pills she tried to swallow to end the misery about a month ago. On another occasion, she cut her wrist with a razor, Sayed said. …Afghanistan is one of the world’s poorest nations, with a third of its 30 million residents living under the poverty line.
So in Afghanistan, according to Reuters, guns don’t kill people; poor people kill people. It’s poverty that’s deadly.
None of the article’s 800 words is devoted to the gun the woman used.
Now compare that with Reuters’ post-mortem (if you will) on the Newtown massacre titled, Connecticut gunman had hundreds of rounds; Obama to console Newtown:
The gunman who slaughtered 20 young children in Connecticut stormed Sandy Hook Elementary School armed with hundreds of bullets for a military-style assault rifle and handguns, and shot himself when police closed in, officials said on Sunday. …He also carried two handguns and hundreds of bullets in “multiple” high-capacity magazines of about 30 rounds each, and had a fourth weapon in reserve — a shotgun in his car outside, Connecticut state police Lieutenant Paul Vance said. …In addition to the military-style Bushmaster assault rifle, a civilian version of the weapon used by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, police said Lanza carried a Glock 10 mm and Sig Sauer 9 mm handguns into the school.
On it goes like that for nearly 1100 words, with no mention even of shooter Adam Lanza’s apparent mental issues.
In another article, Reuters actually assembled what it called a “profile” of the weapon itself. It contains nine bullet (!) points worth of factoids, from price to usability.
Kinda makes you wonder how the media would’ve covered Newtown if Lanza had been a poor Afghan refugee. Or if Afghanistan had a Second Amendment.
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