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Last Tuesday, an 18-year-old boy entered an elementary school in the town of Uvalde, Texas, and murdered 19 children between the ages of eight and 10, as well as two teachers, before being shot down by a Patrol agent. Border that was nearby when the shooting started. At least 15 people were injured and taken to hospitals. According to the governor of the southern entity, Greg Abbott, the attacker, Salvador Ramos, would have warned of his plans minutes before carrying them out on his Facebook account, and before that he had already warned an unknown woman on Instagram .
The massacre shocked American society for being the deadliest attack perpetrated in a school since the Sandy Hook massacre in Connecticut in 2012, as well as for occurring just 10 days after another young man the same age as Ramos, Payton Gendron , killed 10 people and injured three others in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. This crime featured two elements that made it even more disturbing: that it was inspired and motivated by racial hatred and white supremacy, and that Gendron broadcast it live on Twitch.
Such events cannot be separated from the fever for the possession of firearms suffered by the population of our neighboring country to the north. how did he make known The Day At the beginning of the month, in the past two decades the annual production of firearms destined for civilians practically tripled, which went from 3 million 854 thousand 439 rifles, pistols and shotguns, in 1996, to 11 million 497 thousand 441 in 2016 But not only were more weapons manufactured, but they were also acquired from abroad at an accelerated rate: in 2020, 6,831,376 weapons were imported, six times more than the corresponding million 97 thousand 20 years earlier. Such a fixation on these devices has made the United States the only nation in the world with more weapons in the hands of civilians than people, with 120 of these instruments for every 100 inhabitants. According to the Small Arms Survey (SAS), Americans own 393 million of the 857 million civilian weapons in the world.
However, gun craze alone cannot explain the appalling recurrence of a phenomenon like mass shootings, defined by the Violence Archive (GVA) as an event in which four or more people were killed or injured by this type of weapon, and of which there are already at least 212 this year, almost 1.6 a day. Although the debauchery with which they are acquired and used from small pistols to assault rifles undoubtedly facilitates the explosions of violence, these can only be understood in the context of an undeniable mental health crisis and a terrible example by the state apparatus, which, in its daily actions before the international community, teaches its citizens that the use of lethal force is the answer to any dispute and the natural means to achieve its objectives.
After learning of the Uvalde tragedy, President Joe Biden cried out: “When, for God’s sake, are we going to face the lobby of the weapons? It is worth reminding the president and US society that Mexico is facing these lobbyists through a lawsuit against 11 arms manufacturing companies for design and manufacture weapons of war, and market them in a manner that they know routinely supplies to drug cartels in our country
and that, if successful, this lawsuit could lay the groundwork for the introduction of reforms to the legal framework that put a stop to the unbridled and immoral arms trade. It is clear that, if he is sincere in his desire to limit the power of the arms sector, Biden must find a natural ally in Mexico and support the initiative promoted by the Mexican authorities in US courts.