Category Archives: Gun-violence

The Gun Report: October 18, 2013 – NYTimes.com

An 8-year-old boy was shot as a family member handled a stolen gun in Chester, Pa., Thursday afternoon. The child was in a second-floor bedroom of his home when the 9mm Ruger went off, striking him in the buttocks. A 19-year-old family member was arrested.

via The Gun Report: October 18, 2013 – NYTimes.com.

Rep. Issa to investigate? Gunmen kill Libya military police chief in Benghazi | News | DW.DE | 18.10.2013

Unidentified assailants gunned down Libya\’s military police chief outside of his home in Benghazi on Friday, according to Libyan security officials. Colonel Ahmed Mostafa el-Barghathy was reportedly heading to mosque to attend Friday prayers when he killed.

\”Several shots hit Ahmed [Mostafa] el-Barghathy. He was brought to hospital but later died there,\” a security source told the news agency Reuters on the condition of anonymity.

El-Barghathy was one of the first members of the military to take up arms against Moammar Gadhafi in the 2011 uprising.

The latest attack comes roughly a week after the kidnapping of Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan, who was later released unharmed, and attacks on several consulates since this summer. Benghazi was also the site of the high-profile killing of the US ambassador Chris Stevens last year.

via Gunmen kill Libya military police chief in Benghazi | News | DW.DE | 18.10.2013.

Mali’s fight with militants is far from over | World news | The Guardian

At one end of Gao\’s Independence Square, a group of tall, lean youths are dribbling basketballs in the relative cool of the desert dusk. All wear shorts and vests, emblazoned with logos.

They are playing metres away from the site where, only a year ago, Islamist extremists who controlled this part of northern Mali carried out amputations and lashings for what they said were breaches of sharia law.

\”What they did right here was unbelievable, it was terrifying,\” says Konesse, 11, standing in line to shoot hoops, wearing a matching dark blue and lime green vest and knee-length shorts, with the words \”Real Madrid\” running down her leg. \”During the occupation, boys could still play sport, but we girls couldn\’t.\”

Konesse speaks of one girl, 15, who was arrested, drugged and raped by the Islamists when she went to the market alone, and has since fled to Bamako where she remains too scared to return to her hometown.

Since the militants fled in January, girls such as Konesse have been able to return to the freedom to which they are accustomed. But Konesse says she cannot support forgiveness or negotiation with any of those who turned her life, and the lives of her family and neighbours, upside down.

\”They ruined our town, they raped our sisters, destroyed our houses, and beat our mothers,\” says Konesse. \”We will never let them come back.\”

via Mali’s fight with militants is far from over | World news | The Guardian.

The Gun Report: October 16, 2013 – NYTimes.com

19-year-old Dina Dicochea was shot and killed by her boyfriend in Florence, Ariz., Monday afternoon. Police said 20-year-old Ramiro Delcid accidentally shot the victim while trying to scare her with his .38-caliber pistol while they sat in his company work truck. The suspect said he pulled the trigger thinking the gun was unloaded, but one bullet remained and Dicochea was shot in the chest. He was arrested.

via The Gun Report: October 16, 2013 – NYTimes.com.

Children at war: the faces of Syria’s lost generation |The National

The war in Syria has changed so much. The loss of innocence, the phrase so often used to lament the effect of war on the young, has affected the whole country. What was, just two years ago, one of the safest countries in the Middle East is now a war zone. No part of Syria is untouched by violence. As these photographs from Dimitar Dilkoff show, children have been dragged to the front line and the experience of war has escaped few.

It is in these photographs that we see the truth of the Syrian conflict. These are not the terrorists and foreigners of Bashar Al Assad’s fiction. These are the boys and girls of the country, the future men and women of Syria, now begging, fighting, hiding, and surviving, merely for demanding the right to live in freedom.

These are the children of Syria’s war. Boys and girls who cannot go to school, cannot play in the streets safely, cannot live a normal life. These are children who are now breadwinners, whose fathers are dead or vanished, who hear their mothers mourn in the dark hours of the night, children who can no longer remember the voices of their dead friends. It is they who must line up, small elbows jostling, in the filth of refugee camps, edging forward in never-ending lines to bring food and water back to their families, or dodge the snipers and the sadists of Assad’s armies to buy bread from the few bakeries the regime has not bombed.

What makes these images so heart-breaking is how old these children look. In their faces is written the pain of the last two years of the revolution, the terrifying reality of children becoming adults, brutalised into maturity, seeing things no adults should see and feeling things no child should know.

These are the faces of a lost generation. The faces of the millions who have fled Syria or fled their homes for safe haven within their former country, boys and girls whose entire childhoods have been swept away by, as the war poet Wilfred Owen wrote, the monstrous anger of the guns.

* Faisal Al Yafai, opinion writer for The National

via Children at war: the faces of Syria’s lost generation |The National.

The Gun Report: October 11, 2013 – NYTimes.com

A 7-year-old boy was shot in the hip when the car in which he was riding came under fire in Hammond, La., Wednesday evening. The window of the vehicle was struck by a bullet, but his parents were unaware that their son was injured until they stopped at a gas station. Police are soliciting tips.

via The Gun Report: October 11, 2013 – NYTimes.com.