Cowboys and U.S. Gun Culture: Reaffirming Heroism and War (PrensaLibre, Guatemala)
"While the U.S. arms industry is an important source of income for the country, the protection of the lives of its citizens is a fundamental obligation and should prevail. ... The regulatory
framework in the U.S. allows any citizen to own guns, with the exception of
convicts and the mentally ill. It is a way of culturally reaffirming the concept
of heroism, personified by cowboys and soldiers in their use of high-powered
weapons - and in which warmongering is almost an expression of the highest patriotism."
It has happened
again in the United States. There has been a massacre on school grounds, with
20 children and seven adults converted into targets by Adam Lanza,
who shot them down with a rifle similar to those used by U.S. forces in Iraq
and Afghanistan. According to the Spanish newspaper ABC, Lanza fatally shot his mother before
turning the school at Sandy Hook into a scene from Dante.
After the tragedy,
the issue of gun control immediately arose. A mechanism that, if implemented,
could reduce the likelihood of such horrifying acts committed against innocent people. Now
into the fray will come the National Rifle Association, a powerful organization
the philosophical foundation of which is the Second
Amendment, which reads: "A well
regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of
the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
According to some
scholars, in that post-revolutionary time (1791), this amendment protected the
right of the states to have a militia to defend their territory. Of course, this
didn't mean that any citizen could have whatever weapons they wanted and use
them at will. The idea was not to leave the states at the mercy of other forces
during an era influenced by popular uprisings in the style of the French Revolution. The
interpretations, advocates and opponents of this constitutional right are large
in number. The reality is that while the U.S. arms industry is an important source
of income for the country, the protection of the lives of its citizens is a
fundamental obligation and should prevail.
The regulatory framework
in the United States allows any citizen to own guns, with the exception of
convicts and the mentally ill. It is a way of culturally reaffirming the concept
of heroism, personified by cowboys and soldiers in their use of high-powered
weapons - and in which warmongering is almost an expression of the highest patriotism.
The situation is very
different in Guatemala, where the number of people killed
bygunfire is proportionally higher than
in the United States. In this country, gun control is simply poor, and most of
the weapons circulating in the street are illegal - without license or registration.
One may even assume
that many of the legal weapons, apart from those belonging to the security
forces, are in the hands of criminal organizations. Other weapons are in the hands
of private security companies, the personnel of which are generally underpaid
and undertrained.
As can be seen, in
this issue of gun control, there are interlocking interests - some political,
and others economic. The debates in both the United States and Guatemala will
not end in reasonable agreements until the notion takes hold within the circles
of power that people come first, and every human life must be protected as
demanded by ethics and the Constitution.
