Suddenly, in the United States, it is easier to buy a firearm than a bottle of powdered baby milk. It is not a hyperbole pronounced by some political leader. It is a strict description of the events by a Golden State Warriors basketball player, Damion Lee, whose son is six months old today. (Lee was alluding to the baby food supply crisis in the US as a result of the massive withdrawal of it due to a case of contamination).
The politicians, for their part, returned yesterday to the loop that has been formed for decades by the failed efforts of some of them to curb the violence through a certain control of arms. It is about alleviating the problem, because in reality almost nobody talks about tackling it at the root.
President Joe Biden, in an emotional appearance as soon as he returned from Asia and after learning what happened in Texas during his flight on Air Force One, put his finger on one of the yagas in this country with more pistols and rifles than people ( 400 million for 331 million inhabitants): "As a nation we must ask ourselves when, in God's name, are we going to stand up to the gun lobby," said the president. But Biden did not touch the other great yaga of the nation in arms: a wound that, however, many here see as a virtue or a totally untouchable and sacred gift: the Second Amendment to the Constitution, on the right to keep and bear arms, approved in 1791.
When the enemies of these lethal devices bet on prohibiting their more or less free sale – it depends on the state – “their challenge is not the gun lobby but the Second Amendment”, affirmed yesterday the jurist and political analyst Jonathan Turley, an expert in Constitutional right.
It is symptomatic that the popular and incisive documentary filmmaker Michael Moore yesterday received signs of respect from all sides, including the most conservative Republican front, for daring to touch "in all frankness" the taboo in question: "I think we need really drastic action here . Who will tell in the next few days? It's time to repeal the Second Amendment!” Moore exclaimed on MSNBC. And he pointed as if to himself, "You can't say that... Well, why not?" He also questioned whether the nation's founding fathers would have written such a constitutional provision had they known what effect modern bullets, invented nearly half a century later, would have. And he called on his compatriots to recognize that "we are a violent people" and that the United States "was born in violence, with the genocide of the natives."
Biden did not go as far as Moore. He only asked for progress in "common sense" measures against the lack of control in the distribution of weapons. And along these same rather modest lines in European eyes, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer did what he could to secure an upcoming vote on legislation that would strengthen background checks for gun buyers: one of the objectives that, along with the rescue of the ban on assault weapons approved in 1994 but repealed in 2004, the Biden party has been pursuing and the Republicans, systematically knocking down. The sequence has been repeating itself since the shooting mass at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December 2012, which killed 20 children and six adults.
On more than half a dozen occasions since that event, as many other shootings with dozens of deaths gave rise to legislative debates like the one that is now being restarted without significant progress being recorded in any case. And everything indicates that now will be no different. Republicans, while expressing their horror at the Texas massacre, gave no sign yesterday of giving up their stand against any harsh gun control. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, even blamed Democrats and some media outlets for "trying to curtail the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens."
Last year alone, more than 1,500 children died in homicides or as victims of stray bullets. The annual rate of firearm deaths among children under 14 years of age increased by 50% in 2020, the year in which the national production of these tools of death reached 11.39 million units and thus almost tripled the figure of ten years before , of 3.9 million. The gun making machine is well oiled, and will continue to be so, in the United States of America.
