The Colorado massacre: Another search for answers to many
of the same questions. Are more
armed people the solution, as
the National Rifle Foundation
asserts, or is it time for common
sense gun control?
'Violence and
Barbarism' in Retrograde United States (La Jornada, Mexico)
“Events like
yesterday’s exhibit, in short, the devastating effects of an anachronistic and
deadly approach to gun control that prevails in the United States that amounts
to the reproduction, on a national scale, of the 'law of the jungle' that
Washington has sought to impose on the world. … it sees itself as a great champion
of civility for the rest of the world, but instead finds itself a more backward
place, thanks to its systematic tendency toward violence and barbarism.”
James Holmes: Yet another in a long line of deranged individuals who had no trouble obtaining automatic weapons and pleanty of ammunition to kill innocent people. Is it time to fine tune the availability of firearms?
The mass murder that occurred during the first few minutes in
a Colorado theater yesterday - where an armed gunman killed at least 12 people
and wounded more than 50 - brought forth voices of condemnation and solidarity
in the society and political class of the United States, from the nation’s president,
Barack Obama, who declared five days of national mourning as a sign of respect
for the victims of this act of senseless violence, to his Republican rival,
Mitt Romney, and has rekindled the perennial debate about the need to regulate arms
trade in that country.
Posted by Worldmeets.US
This massacre is the bloodiest event since the April 2007 shootings
at Virginia Tech,
where 33 people died as a consequence of two attacks with firearms by a student
there. Unfortunately, acts like that at a university campus and this one at a movie
theater are not isolated events: 13 years later, the memory of the infamous April,
1999 slaughter at Columbine High School - also in Colorado - is still fresh. At
Columbine, fifteen students were killed.
One must also add to the list the violent events at the end
of 2007, when a 19-year-old armed with an assault rifle killed eight people at
a mall in Nebraska, as well as the string of bloody events in 2009: in March, the
killing of 11 people in a series of shootings in Alabama; in April, the
hostages that were taken at an immigrant center in the town of Binghamton, New
York, which ended in the murder of 14 people; and the mass murder perpetrated
by the Pakistani-American [Palestinian American, actually] psychologist Nidal Malik Hasan on a
military base in Fort Hood, Texas, where 13 people died (12 soldiers and one
policeman), with 31 seriously wounded. And in January of last year, a shooting
in Tucson, Arizona, left six people dead and 13 wounded, one of whom was
Representative Gabrielle Giffords. The list also
includes a series of lesser shootings in many of our neighbor’s cities, which
usually leave behind dead and wounded.
These horrifying episodes all share one indisputable common denominator
– aside from the mental disorders of the individuals who carried them out: the
excessive proliferation of firearms among our neighboring country’s population,
supported by the Second
Amendment to the Constitution, which grants all citizens the unrestricted
right to arm themselves. It is estimated that there are almost 300 million
individually-owned firearms in the United States - almost one per person - and on
a daily basis, on average more than 80 people die from assaults committed with such
weapons. The possession of firearms - illegal or not - on the part of resident of
that nation is also fueled by the determined support of reactionary and
chauvinistic segments of U.S. society, such as the National Rifle
Association (NRA), an ultra-conservative organization closely tied to the
Republican Party, which has dedicated itself to opposing any government
attempt to regulate the trade in firearms. What happened at the theater in
Colorado coincides with the discussion in the United States over the adoption
of a treaty among U.N. member states to better-regulate the international trade
in conventional arms [The
U.N. Arms Trade Treaty]. This has been portrayed by the NRA as an attempt
on the part of Obama to limit the aforementioned constitutional provision
Events like yesterday’s exhibit, in short, the devastating
effects of an anachronistic and deadly approach to gun control that prevails in
the United States that amounts to the reproduction, on a national scale, of the
“law of the jungle” that Washington has sought to impose on the world. The lack
of ability or willingness of the Obama Administration to regulate and contain
the sale of weapons not only periodically results in a nation in mourning, it
affects other nations like ours - remember the massive smuggling of weapons from
the United States into Mexico under Operation Fast
and Furious.
The Colorado massacre is further of evidence that the
current U.S. government has been defeated by the ominous inertia so prevalent in
the politics, economy and culture of that country, which sees itself as a great
champion of civility for the rest of the world, but which instead finds itself a
more backward place thanks to its systematic tendency toward violence and
barbarism.
