A police investigator with the Atlanta Police Department was shot recently. He’s expected to recover, but the shooting still happened. Because he was only injured in the line of duty, it didn’t make the headlines it might have otherwise, even in Georgia.

But it’s still news.

Atlanta is the most liberal city in Georgia and has a long history of trying to skirt the state’s preemption laws, so it wasn’t surprising when I finally saw an article on the story and it had a headline like this: “Atlanta Mayor Addresses Gun Control and Domestic Violence Following Shooting of Police Investigator.”

Clearly, he spoke extensively about gun control.

Only, he didn’t.

An Atlanta Police Department Investigator is currently recovering from a gunshot wound sustained while issuing a warrant, an incident that has triggered community concerns over domestic violence and gun control, said Mayor Andre Dickens.

…

Mayor Dickens stated that the suspect “had no business having a gun in the first place.” Acknowledging domestic violence as a national crisis, the Mayor emphasized the need for unity in addressing this issue.

The suspect was wanted for murdering a mother of four and had barricaded himself in a house, so that’s why domestic violence came up. But that quote there was the only mention of a gun or anything that remotely looks like “addressing gun control” in any way.

In this context, it sure seems like a stretch. Current gun laws prohibit domestic abusers from owning guns, so that could easily be the whole “had no business having a gun in the first place” thing.

But maybe the mayor’s actual comments included more.

Except, it didn’t.

That bit is the only inclusion of a mention of guns and who shouldn’t have them.

Now, that is still a troubling comment, but without context, we don’t actually know much about Derrick Rankins, the man who was accused of killing this mother and has since, including any prohibited status that he might have had. If he had a history of domestic violence, which Dickens’s comments suggest, then he was already prohibited.

What we have here is a case of a media making a connection that might not exist.

Granted, I’m not expecting top-notch journalism from an outlet called “Hoodline” anyway, but it just seems to me that if you’re going to say the mayor addressed gun control, he should actually have said something about gun control, rather than some ambiguous statement about whether a violent individual should have been permitted to have a gun or not.

Does Dickens favor gun control? Most likely. Yet here, it’s impossible to tell if he somehow thinks current laws are insufficient and we need new laws or we somehow need to better enforce the laws on the books. The last one sounds a lot like things said by gun rights advocates.

It feels like this is trying to push the anti-gun narrative so hard that the writer read that part in where it might not have belonged. I don’t appreciate that, especially as Dickens spent a lot more time talking about domestic violence, which is a very real problem and one that we need to address throughout the nation and the world as a whole.