It’s just a snippet of conversation, poached a couple of days ago in a Manhattan cafe. It describes a state of mind in a country armed to the teeth to war with itself.
“A friend has a house in Connecticut and has invited me there for the weekend. I told him no, that if I get the property wrong, they’ll shoot me,” quipped one of the parishioners.
This week is a week to reflect on the folly of bowing down to guns as secular crucifixes and the leaders of the rifle lobby (NRA) as prophets who urge people to buy guns because they need to be ready against heretics.
Four banal incidents, harmless mistakes in ordinary situations, recorded in six days, such as getting confused at the door, on the road, in the car or going to look for a ball that has fallen in someone else’s yard, have left a 20-year-old young woman dead, three teenagers and a girl injured, as well as two adults.
“The truth is that we live in a nation where more and more people shoot first and ask questions later. I think people are outraged and disgusted by this,” John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, a non-profit organization that promotes control measures on the sale and possession of weapons, told NBC. “Parents ask themselves, will my son be next?”, he said.
There is a sense that the United States is in a spiral of violence fostered by a right wing increasingly radicalized in its fears, in full conspiratorial obsession and politicians of the Apocalypse to disable the enemy.
The civil war rhetoric of ex-president Donald Trump is the best example. Last weekend he spoke in Indianapolis at the NRA’s big annual fair where kids are taught to handle “toys” that really kill.
The party was preceded by two massacres, in an elementary school in Tennessee and in a bank in Louisville, with a dozen dead. Trump’s recipe consisted of arming everyone to fight the “bad guys” and the Democrats.
Endorsed by an ultra-conservative majority in the Supreme Court, which defends the literalness of the Second Amendment to the Constitution – the right to bear arms, from 1791 -, more and more republican states are passing so-called self-defense or bear arms laws in sight
The perception that violent crime is increasing is not a manufactured myth. There are 49,000 gun deaths in the US annually. Until this Friday, 167 mass shootings have been recorded in 2023. In four months, 13,000 people have died from armed violence, of which more than 520 were children and teenagers. Between 2020 and 2022, Americans have bought 60 million guns. 20% of households have acquired one of these artifacts. At least 5% have purchased one for the first time.
“It’s a totally different type of property. It is no longer a shotgun for hunting a couple of times a year. Now they are semi-automatic pistols or rifles that you keep on your bedside table, in your glove compartment or carry on your shoulder,†said the NORC group at the University of Chicago.
“He is responsible for his actions, falling into fear and paranoia fueled by the 24-hour news cycle and wild conspiracies didn’t help his state of mind,” said Klint Ludwing, grandson of Andrew Lester, a white neighbor of Kansas City, 84, who shot Ralp Yarl, 16. The black teenager rang his doorbell by mistake.
Something similar happened to Kaylin Gillis, 20, who drove a vehicle into the driveway of a private estate and the owner, Kevin Monahan, 65, opened fire, even though the car had turned around. Gillis died.
Then came the two cheerleaders (Payton Washington and Heather Roth) who got into the wrong car in Texas and Pedro Tello RodrÃguez (25) shot them, ignoring the apologies. And, in North Carolina, six-year-old Kinsley White, whose left cheek was grazed by a bullet fired by Robert Louis Singletary (24) when he went to pick up a ball in a neighbor’s yard. His parents were injured.
“Why are you shooting my dad and me?†Kinsley asked. Perhaps, and despite his innocence, he has already understood what it means to live in an armed country.
