An 18-year-old teenager opened fire on Tuesday, May 24, 2022, in an elementary school in Texas, killing 19 young students and two adults, a tragedy that plunged America into a repeating nightmare.
The killing at a high school in Parkland, Florida in 2018, 17 dead. The racist shooting of May 14, in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, at least 10 dead. And on June 1, 2022, a new drama in Tulsa, in a hospital in Oklahoma, 4 dead. The psychoanalyst Claude Halmos returns to these mass killings and the free sale of arms across the Atlantic.
franceinfo: How can such acts be explained and what role does the fact that the weapons are on sale play?
Claude Halmos: Someone who performs such an act is not in reality. He’s in a movie he’s built in his head, and he believes to be the reality. This film, he built it in general from very heavy psychological sufferings which he underwent, and which were often added to an inheritance (unconscious) of sufferings undergone in the preceding generations.
He was not helped for these sufferings, and often they even went unnoticed. So he made a kind of delusional interpretation of it, which constitutes the film in which he lives. And in the script of this movie, he has to kill. So he chooses people who probably symbolically evoke his suffering, and he kills them, because the inner barriers that normally prevent a human being from acting out don’t work for him. Either because of delirium, or because they were never put in place.
How are these barriers put in place?
A child, at the beginning of his life, obeys his impulses: when he runs, for example, he jostles everyone who is in his path; and he finds that perfectly normal.
It is the explanations given by his parents, and the limits they put on him, daily, that allow him to understand that it is not; that in a civilized society, we must respect others and the laws. And therefore to learn little by little to control oneself and not to solve one’s problems by actions, but by words.
And this education is essential because it is what allows him to gradually differentiate, in his head, the imagination, where everything is possible, from reality, where everything is not.
In relation to all this, what role can the legalization of arms play?
It plays a very big role because it is essential that a child knows that the rules that his parents impose on him correspond to those of society (He is not allowed to hit his friends, but no one has this law, and the law moreover sanctions “assaults and injuries”). This allows him to become aware of the strength and the importance of prohibitions.
So conversely, how can a child understand, even if his parents explain it to him, the ban on murder, if he lives in a country where you can buy weapons, like candy, at the supermarket? ? The trivialization of weapons trivializes the act of killing, and their legalization weakens the prohibition.
They therefore weigh on education, but also encourage the passage to the act of people who are not well, because they imply a dangerousness of the world, which can validate their desire to kill, and return it to them, moreover , easy to perform. And above all because this ease allows them, when they already have trouble telling the difference between their imagination and reality, to slide without problems from one to the other.