Cartoon of 28/05/2022 in CTXT
On 24 May, 18-year-old Salvador Rolando Ramos shot his grandmother in the face, seriously wounding her, and drove to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, armed with a pistol and a rifle. There he killed nineteen children and two teachers. He also wounded seventeen others before being shot by police, although at one point he was said to have been arrested.
Yet another killing spree that provoked the usual debate and will soon be buried until the next killer comes along and takes another bunch of people with him.
It can all be boiled down to one question: Why? The quick and perhaps simplistic answer, though not that simplistic, is because they can
"As a well-ordered militia is necessary for the security of a Free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms"
With this terse and flexible phrase, added as an amendment to their Constitution in 1791, Americans can walk down the street with a potent killing machine.
The thing, written for territories where the state had not yet been established and security was provided by private armies or self-defence groups and in times when to fire a shot you had to make a mess in which you had to spend a lot of minutes, is still today the excuse to carry, modify and end up using assault weapons that allow more than 700 shots per minute to be fired.
Mike Peterson, in The Daily Cartoonist takes issue with this argument and, citing this cartoon from Drew Shenemanthe Second Amendment, he recalls, is not alone in pointing out the rudimentary gun technology that prevailed when the Second Amendment was written.
Peterson thus seeks to refute those who believe he would have "updated" the Second Amendment:
"Even Scalia -that misinterpreted the intent of the 2nd Amendment- wrote that there is no constitutional right for civilians to possess military-grade weapons".
"Who here thinks that "freedom of the press" should apply only to 18th-century single-sheet hand printing?" asks Peterson, drawing a crude and ironic (I suppose) comparison.
One thing that is undeniable is that, once again, the noise ate it all up. Stupid debates about putting more doors in schools, about questionable police intervention and the usual "..."guns don't kill, they kill people". But, of course, Ramos could not have killed 21 people so easily and so quickly and wounded 18 if he had tried to do so armed only with a baseball bat, given the impossibility of being able to get hold of an AR-15 like someone who buys a can of soda.
Ted Cruz left one of the most embarrassing scenes in history with this shameful reaction when asked about possible gun law reforms.
To make matters worse, just days after one of the worst school shootings in the last ten years, the annual convention of the RNA National Rifle Association was held and where, paradoxically for morons, it was forbidden to enter with guns to listen to a very special guest who came to defend the gun lobby. Trump was there to do what he does best, play the idiot.
There he defended that: "In the face of shootings like this, we must buy more guns". And other classics too; we need to arm teachers.
And then he did a little dance.
Even if they did come up with a disarmament plan, it would take hundreds of years to remove the thousands of tons of weapons, legal and illegal, that are circulating in the country It's their custom and you have to respect the fact that they kill each other with them.
