The United States is in shock, Wednesday, May 25, after a mass shooting in a school in Texas, which made, tuesday, 21 dead including 19 children. As the gun control debate is once again on the table, the subject is once again likely to clash with the lobby of gun advocates, the National Rifle Association (NRA).
It is often presented as the most powerful pressure group in the world. This is the consequence of its political weight in the United States. However, at the beginning, the NRA is only an association of hunters created by two soldiers of the Civil War, in 1871. It is necessary to wait a century, at the beginning of the 1970s, to see the NRA become a real group of political pressure.
Its basis is to defend the freedom to bear arms, guaranteed in the second amendment of the American Constitution. This amendment also highlights the “necessity of a well-organized militia in a free state”. With its five million members, its 300 million dollar budget, its own television channel NRATV, and the support of some movie stars like Clint Eastwood or Chuck Norris, the NRA decides to invest the field political, that is to say, to finance electoral campaigns and publicity spots for candidates who undertake to defend the carrying of arms and to oppose any restrictions on firearms.
Most often, they are Republican Party candidates. The NRA particularly supports the candidate Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Even today, the former American president never misses an opportunity to come to the NRA congress. It also takes place from Friday in Houston (Texas), in the same state as the one where the Uvalde killing took place. Donald Trump will also deliver a speech at the opening,
This Texas massacre is reminiscent of many others, but especially one in particular: the Sandy Hook massacre on December 14, 2012 in Connecticut, in the northeast of the country. Uvalde’s tragedy is almost a copy-and-paste of Sandy Hook. The murderer is a 20-year-old man with no clear history who begins by shooting his mother and taking his car before breaking into a school. He then shoots indiscriminately at children, most of whom are 6 or 7 years old. The killings left 26 dead. In Texas, the attacker is 18 years old, he shoots his grandmother before going to school and kills 21 people, including 19 children barely older than the victims of Sandy Hook.
The Sandy Hook tragedy had triggered a wave of emotion. “We can’t tolerate this anymore”, then said Barack Obama, President of the United States at the time. Flags were lowered across the country and a bill had been launched to restrict the carrying of weapons. It will not succeed, blocked in the Senate. On the other hand, arms sales exploded in the country after the tragedy. Ten years later, the same phenomenon is to be feared: a wave of emotion and nothing in the end. After the tragedy in Texas, several parents of Sandy Hook expressed themselves on social networks, to wonder: “How many children will have to die and until when?”