In the aftermath of the Uvalde and Buffalo killings, a crack opened up in the Republicans’ blind opposition to any idea of gun control. An insignificant breach in the absolute at the same time as notable in the American context, it says a lot above all about the difficulty of the United States to put on trial a “culture of gun deeply rooted.
The bipartisan deal announced Sunday is unprecedented, but it falls short of advocating, as Democrats should and have long proposed, a ban on assault rifles and the creation of a universal system of background checks on buyers. . In fact, you don’t have to be particularly demanding or cynical to find that this agreement between Democratic and Republican senators accomplishes little more than the prayers that Republicans simply offer for the victims and their families when a killing occurs.
So, following concessions wrung from Republicans, background checks would be improved for buyers aged 18 to 21, including, for the first time, checking the candidate’s mental health background. Another measure, which Republicans never wanted to know about, would only make it harder for men charged with domestic violence to buy and own a gun.
So many concessions that incompletely address the serious problem of easy and legal access to guns in civilian space, but which Democrats, including diehards like left-leaning Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have decided to see as a small step in the right direction on the part of the Republican Party, riveted without nuance on the defense of the second amendment of the Constitution on the bearing of arms.
In a nutshell, it’s a compromise that wouldn’t really have stopped an 18-year-old young man from getting an AR-15 assault rifle to kill nineteen schoolchildren and two female teachers in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, nor a white supremacist, also 18 years old, to take the lives of ten black people a few days earlier in Buffalo.
Biden soberly raced for the deal, on the prospect of legislative success. However, there is a long way to go, as there are less than two weeks left in the session, which leaves little time to pass a law. The ten Republicans who signed the agreement take little risk, except to be criticized by their colleagues: four are going to retire and the six others do not have to face voters in the mid-term elections. -mandate in November. With the result that it is a breach which risks, unfortunately, to close quickly.
Recurring question: how did our neighbors get there? The arms market, other than military, appeared in the United States at the end of the 19e century, with the commercialization of the revolver invented by a certain Samuel Colt during the war of extermination of the indigenous peoples (Indian wars, 1778-1890). It was he, along with others, who instilled in the nascent national consciousness the feeling that danger—the “Wild West”—was virtually everywhere, recounts William Hosley in Colt: The Making of an American Legendcited in a paper by New Yorker. This was followed in the 1950s by the appearance of the infamous AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, a lighter version of the M-14 military assault rifle.
Even today, the National Rifle Association (NRA) succeeds, through marketing and mythologizing, in maintaining the idea of an omnipresent “Wild West” and, therefore, in perpetuating a market for weapons that are almost freely available. So much so, writes the New Yorkerthat along with the automobile, firearms – 20 million have been sold in 2021 – are, for many Americans, “the cornerstone of a way of life”.
Another turning point in the development of the arms market came with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the so-called Barack Boom. When crime rates were actually at their lowest in decades, the NRA and Republicans boosted industry sales by arguing that the United States had never had a president “so anti-freedom.” to carry a weapon”. See how much, from the extermination of indigenous peoples to the election of the first black president, the dissemination of weapons in the United States has racist springs.
Amazing that this American weapon sickness didn’t infect us sooner. We were sheltered, we are no longer so—neither socially nor politically. In Montreal, 144 violent firearm events occurred in 2021, twice as many as in 2020. Quebec has taken note of this and is taking action, among other things, to curb arms trafficking through Akwesasne. As for Ottawa, it cannot be said that it is particularly proactive in the fight against clandestine markets. He cannot wait for the United States to listen to reason upstream.