Sally Winter in New South Wales

Essay here. Excerpt:

'The blind spots and the rush to judgement that are strewn about the possible criminality of mothers are modestly illustrated by the case of Sally Winter, from the small town of Maitland in New South Wales. She killed her family and then herself, but because it’s an article of faith with us that a woman could not act in such a way, early reports about this family massacre arbitrarily cast the husband and father as villain. Breaking accounts leapt to that conclusion on no apparent evidence. So the Sydney Daily Telegraph felt able to blare in its front-page headline: “FATHER SHOOTS FAMILY DEAD” — a wholly incorrect assertion for which that notorious newspaper declined to apologise. Its misinformation was picked up and repeated on the commercial radio networks, whose producers knew a story when they heard one.
...
What if anything do we learn from all this? Obviously, that women kill. That women are more than capable of violence and in many situations lack only the means — a lack which the presence of a gun removes. Feminists will always have lots to say about the plight of women in unhappy marriages — about bullying from the husband, about the way economic and family pressures bear down especially on the wife, about the general frustration which life in a patriarchy involves, and perhaps about a female past (real or imagined) stuffed with low self-esteem, sexual abuse and what-all else. Any reader can string together his own classic details.

For our own part we might suppose, if we knew more about the Winters, that one of the things which turns men to anger and sometimes, very unfortunately, to direct action is their understanding that society has no interest in hearing them, has no sympathy or support for them when their marriage comes unglued. Men are supposed to look after themselves. Society knows too well who the culprit must be when a marriage goes bad.

Soon after the Winter catastrophe some politicians were calling for an enquiry into why their guns had been handed back. Police defended the decision to return the firearms on the dumb-cop basis that they were “simply following procedure”. No charges had been laid over the domestic argument, and the apprehended violence orders had been withdrawn. The idea that police should occasionally use their brains instead of “simply following procedure” was not pursued — perhaps because of the known threat which police brains pose to the public.'