The United States suffers from a deadly disease that it is unable to cure. The Congress of this country has just pass a law which appears to do so. A bipartisan group of senators announced a “compromise of principles,” which included “necessary mental health resources, improved school safety and support for students, and helps ensure that dangerous criminals and those declared mentally ill are not can buy weapons. As we can see, the bipartisan agreement, advertised as an “arms control agreement” controls absolutely none, it would only help soften the criminal effects that its lack of control has on the population, especially on minors. And now, almost to the hype of the entire press, that agreement has become law.
USA: Congress approves law to make it difficult to own weapons
From 1999 to 2017, the statistics are relentless: 38,942 minors died from firearms, about 2,147 a year. In 2017, bullets killed 2,462 minors in the United States, more than the 1,000 soldiers who died that year while fighting around the world, and more than the 144 police officers who died while keeping order in this great nation.
In the barely six months in 2022 to date, there have been 27 armed attacks on primary schools and 212 mass shootings. We’ve really been making progress on mass shootings1: in 2019 there were 417, in 2020 there were 611 and last year we reached 693. At the rate we are going, this year attacks on children in their classrooms will also be exceeded. In both 2018 and 2019 there were 24 attacks (each year) on schools, while in 2021 they went up to 34, and based on what has happened so far in 2022, with 27, we will certainly exceed the number of attacks from last year.
The statistics don’t lie: homicides in the United States with firearms are 25.2 times higher than in the rest of the developed countries. Americans own more guns than any other country on the planet, and there are more mass civilian shootings in the United States than anywhere else. Is it difficult to see the relationship? It seems so, both for legislators, especially Republicans, and for a large part of the citizens of this great nation who vote in elections and choose politicians who prefer to keep their position and lead from the rear, instead of doing something for the good common.
President Biden said it apropos of the Senate announcement: It’s not enough. Semi-automatic rifles, high-capacity cartridges and their sale to minors should also be prohibited.
I personally understand it, it is a big business, and many of the senators and congressmen participate in said profits through donations for their political campaigns, but its immorality is also clear if we consider that it has cost the lives of thousands of minors. But, as Jimmy Kimmel asked Biden on his recent show, “why doesn’t he make an executive order on it?” The president replied that he did not want to violate the constitutional order, as Donald Trump used to do. He prefers to be politically correct and continue with the simulation.
It is true that many of these civilian massacres —although none in schools— are the product of illegal weapons, in gangster fights in which minors participate criminally or are simple victims, such as children in their cradles who have been pierced by a projectile while they slept
It is difficult to understand how it is possible that the United States, “leader of world democracy” and “vanguard of the free world” has not found, nor does it seem that it will find, in the short term, a solution so that this country is not also “world leader in massacres of minors” and in attacks on classrooms where primary school children learned to be useful citizens. What other disaster will we have to wait for legislators to actually change the laws?
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Note:
1 Data from Gun Violence Archivewhich defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people were injured or killed, excluding the attacker.
Sources:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/
https://www.
https://www.bloomberg.com/
https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/
