The shooting perpetrated on Tuesday at an elementary school in the town of Uvalde, Texas, and which resulted in the death of 19 children and two adults has reopened the debate on gun control in the United States. However, the claim of a wide sector of the right to bear arms, both in terms of idiosyncrasy and legal, weighs down any cuts.
Former President Barack Obama has already placed special emphasis during his term on the need to limit access to weapons, especially for potentially dangerous people, with symbolic speeches like the one he delivered, with tears in his eyes, after the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.
“When in God’s name are we going to stand up in front of the gun lobby?“, the current president, Joe Biden, also implored emotionally on Tuesday night, a supporter of transforming “pain” into “action” to adopt measures that, in his opinion, are “common sense.”
Obstacles
The great ‘lobby’ in favor of gun ownership is the National Rifle Association (NRA), but it is not alone. In the political field, it has support mainly within the Republican Party and recovered part of the ground lost during the stage of Donald Trump at the White House.
Those who oppose possible restrictions rely on the Second Amendment of the Constitution: “A well-ordered militia being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be violated.”. To be able to suppress or modify it, it is necessary to comply with some difficult terms to achieve.
Thus, any change in the text approved in 1788 —to which the Second Amendment was added in 1789— requires the support of two-thirds of the members of both houses of Congress, as well as three-quarters of the states in the country (38). There is a second option, for now unprecedented in the history of the United States: that two-thirds of the states convene a constitutional convention.
The legal milestone of 2008
The year 2008 marked a before and after in the arguments of those who defend the right to bear arms. Until then, it was understood that citizens did not have individual rights as such, but that it was up to local, state and federal authorities to regulate this aspect.
However, everything changed with the Supreme Court ruling in the case ‘District of Columbia v. Heller’. This citizen had challenged the constitutionality of the ban on the possession of weapons in Washington, considered the most restrictive in the country, and the Supreme Court judges agreed with him, endorsing individual rights.
“The Second Amendment protects the right of an individual to possess a firearm even if not in the service of a militia and to use that weapon for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense at home,” the justices said.
social division
The defense to bear arms is particularly entrenched in the southern states of the United States, while at the national level the population remains divided. The Gallup firm reflects in its most recent survey (October 2021) that 52 percent of citizens demand stricter laws, compared to 35 percent who advocate maintaining the current ones and 11 percent who ask that they be even more lax .
To this day, it is not even clear how many weapons there are in the United States today, with different estimates speaking between 270 and 310 million. Some 42 percent of Americans have a gun in their own home, according to Gallup research.
Regarding their owners, the polling firms agree that they are mostly men —three out of four, according to the Pew Research Center— and white (more than 80 percent), which means that this group has a number of weapons that practically doubles its representativeness within the North American population in general.
Shootings continue in the United States
At least seven people died on May 14 in a shooting occurred in a supermarket in the US city of Buffalo (New York), according to local press reports citing police sources.
The city Police Department indicated that the incident took place in the Tops supermarket, near the center of Buffalo, a city located in the extreme north of the state of New York.
On the other hand, on May 21, at least one person died and nine more were injured After another shooting happened at a party lCalifornian town of San Bernardino.
The event occurred just before midnight on Friday at a party in that town, located 100 kilometers east of The Angels (California).
The authorities indicated that the injured were quickly transferred to nearby medical centers, without detailing the seriousness of their condition.
(With information from Europa Press and EFE)
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