The gun cult – an American cancer

During the opening of the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association (NRA), on Friday, May 27, the former president of the United States Donald Trump read the names of the 21 victims of the school massacre of Texas. Each name was accompanied by a bell. This was the first time that the NRA recognized the victims of a massacre, and in the voice of Trump, it was trying to create an electoral shield for the next presidential elections in the United States in the year 2024.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, in the United States from January 1 to May 24 of this year there had been 17,202 deaths from firearms, divided into 9,570 suicides and 7,632 murders. In that same period, there had been 213 mass shootings and also 10 mass murders, which are those events in which at least four people had died, not including the perpetrator. By 2020, according to Johns Hopkins University, gunshot deaths were the leading cause of death for children over one year of age.

Second amendment 
 Every debate about firearms in the United States invokes a constitutional foundation that does not exist in most countries of the world: the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. The text of this constitutional article says the following: “A well-organized Militia being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to possess and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Understand that this constitutional amendment was born in the eighteenth century, to refer to the fact that each of the thirteen colonies that originally formed the United States could form its own army. Remember that the young nation was at war with England until 1812. This anachronistic constitutional text has served as an umbrella for the most widespread possession of firearms in the world.

The population of the United States represents 4% of the world’s population, yet it has 50% of the weapons held by civilians on the planet.

In 1865, after the American Civil War, the NRA was formed as an organization to promote the ownership of weapons among individuals, as a response to the exacerbated growth of the country’s armed forces due to the war.

That same year the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was founded, a white supremacist organization that, although it did not share the values ​​of individualism of the NRA, did share its implicit purpose: that of a white-dominated society that was autonomous from the growing federal state.

The proliferation of comics and then the rise of Hollywood popularized a vision of the Old West based on violence, in which a cowboy with a Colt pistol and a Winchester rifle colonized more than half of the United States. Historians have been able to document that it was actually much more dangerous and violent to walk the streets of Boston or New York than it was on the cattle plains of the West.

Political gridlock
In April 1999, two teenagers, outcast students taunted by their peers, massacred 12 people at Columbine High School in Colorado. The then-president of the United States, Bill Clinton, of the Democratic Party, was not able to obtain reform of the legislation to prevent modified weapons of war from being freely sold, and that other controls on the purchase or possession of weapons were applied.

President Clinton got more than 30,000 public schools in the United States to upgrade their security measures, including police and metal detectors. These measures did not serve to stop any of the school massacres that have taken place in the last 23 years.

For the administration of President Barak Obama, the resistance was even worse, since, counting on the Democratic majority in both houses of the United States Congress, it was not capable of advancing any reform in this matter.

Now it is the turn of President Joe Biden to change this reality. In the United States, it is easier to buy an assault rifle than an antibiotic, and there are more restrictions on the sale of alcohol than on the sale of bullets.

In 1994, the last time a restrictive gun rule was won, the effort was led by a Democratic senator named Joe Biden. At that time it was possible to negotiate with the Republican’s rules of common sense in this matter. Still, that didn’t prevent Columbine, and now with Donald Trump dominating the Republican Party, there is very little to look forward to.

Rodrigo Noriega  LA PRENSA