The Foreign Journalist’s Path to Enlightenment

As we all know, Americans’ love affairs with God and guns baffle foreigners. In that respect this Reuters story is obviously not aimed at the wires’ US clients. It’s meant to be helpful and explanatory and is, therefore, a good thing. In fact it’s a kind of journalistic rite-of-passage you need to pass through to demonstrate that, to some extent at least, you’ve moved beyond the cartoon stereotypes of America that editors – and many readers – love so much.

Still, one can’t help but smile at this sort of stuff (emphasis added):

The American affinity for guns may puzzle foreigners who link high ownership rates and liberal gun ownership laws to the 84 gun deaths and 34 gun homicides that occur in the United States each day and wonder why gun control is not an issue in the U.S. presidential election. The owners are not just urban criminals and drug dealers.