Weapon of Choice

The problem isn’t simply that American society is immersed in firearms, but that their sale remains largely uncontrolled. The National Rifle Association and Congressional Republicans’ nuisance power is oh-so-powerful! Can this power be overcome? Though doors may be closed at the federal level, they aren’t at the state and municipal levels.

The massacre of 14 people in a San Bernardino social assistance center links an act of politico-religious insanity, inspired by the Islamic State, to the old gun culture that poisons American society — a particularly lethal combination of mentalities. Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the alleged perpetrators of the massacre, “seemed to be living the American Dream,” an acquaintance stated to the Los Angeles Times. The dream ended like a typical Hollywood action movie, with the hero using his machine gun in a bloody annihilation of evil.

Two challenges arise from the events in that small California town on Dec. 2: the efficiency of the Islamic State group’s calls to jihad and the indecisiveness of Americans toward the ever-increasing problem of access to firearms — a large proportion of which are military weapons, both automatic and semi-automatic.

There are 300 million guns in circulation south of the border. About 40 percent of these — which goes to show the extent of the social irresponsibility of authorities — are acquired without preliminary safety checks. In the United States, you have as much of a chance of dying from gunfire as you do in a car accident; in France, you’re as likely to die of hypothermia. Mass killings, which we must say are imprecisely defined, have tripled over the past four years. During this same period, 37 states loosened legal restrictions on owning and carrying guns. As a result, sales have been on the rise for a long time, and people run to gun retailers as a poorly thought-out personal defense reflex, when particularly bloody massacres occur. “And it seems that far too many Americans appear to be willing to accept a certain amount of bloodshed — as long as it’s not perpetrated by Muslims,” the leftist weekly [publication] The Nation stated with irony.

The scandalous fact that citizens can legally, that is, freely, buy weapons of war is directly attributable to the extremist NRA lobby and Congressional Republicans who defend its madness. They go as far as opposing universal criminal background checks, even while public opinion surveys indicate that nearly nine out of 10 Americans understand the necessity of adopting such a basic measure.

According to government numbers, over 2,000 Americans under surveillance for terrorist activities were able to legally buy guns and explosives between 2004 and 2014 — a strange lapse in a country obsessed with national security.

In his day, Ronald Reagan, the apotheosized Republican president, was in favor of gun control. “Every year, an average of 9,200 Americans are murdered by handguns. […] This level of violence must be stopped,” he wrote in a 1991 New York Times piece.

Twenty-five years later, the NRA and its acolytes are continuing to fight tooth and nail for their market, justifying themselves with a twisted interpretation of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees citizens the right to bear arms.

Yet in 2008, the Supreme Court stated that “the Second Amendment right is not unlimited.” This is sensible, but negates what the NRA has continued to wage a litigious guerrilla war against. On Monday, for the 17th time since 2008, the Supreme Court destroyed the gun lobby’s pretensions in a case that aimed to invalidate a law adopted by the city of Highland Park (near Chicago), banning semi-automatic guns.

The reality is that for five years, U.S. cities and states adopted hundreds of gun control measures. All were contested under the Second Amendment, and they were practically all upheld by the courts, which means that the NRA and the Republicans’ insanities are not insurmountable. They can be disarmed little by little.