The United States of America and its Failed Democracy

Scenes from the Columbine HS Massacre, April 1999.  13 Victims in all, not counting the two teenage killers. No one thought that mass shootngs would become almost a daily occurrence.

That the history of the United States of America can be told by the common thread of violence is something few dispute. This characteristic of U.S. society is a constant threat to the country’s own citizens, but it also spills over its borders and is expressed in its foreign policy. Financing for violence, arms shipments, covert troops, open wars, unilateral sanctions, have made this a more insecure world in the name of U.S. national security.

Last Sunday, President Biden declared five days of national mourning for the victims of a mass shooting that took place on Saturday, May 6, in a shopping mall in Allen, Texas, in which 8 people were killed and the attacker, who fired indiscriminately with an assault rifle of which -according to data from the last 5 years- more than one and a half million have been sold in the country, was shot and killed. The shooting killed a five year old child, as confirmed by the President himself, who lamented that the greatest cause of death of children in the United States is precisely gun violence.

Let’s leave out of the analysis the fact that Biden says he deplores gun deaths in the U.S. while he does nothing to prevent gun deaths outside its borders.

So far this year alone there have been more than 200 shootings in the US classified as “mass” (those that leave four or more fatalities), while gun deaths have averaged, according to recognized estimates, nearly four deaths every hour. Gun violence is multiplying in inconceivable episodes such as the recent shooting of a teenager who knocked on the wrong door, behind which there was a deranged man… armed with a revolver.

Biden, like all recent presidents, publicly expressed his sorrow for the dead in Allen and reiterated his request to Congress to draft a bill to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines…, other firearms are apparently not considered dangerous by the US president, while in the midst of his public grief he did not forget to take the opportunity to make politics and put all the blame on the Republicans, who undoubtedly share it.

Biden spoke of “…senseless acts of violence”, Trump at the time described as “an act of pure evil” the bloody shooting at a concert in Las Vegas that killed dozens of people. Obama’s tears were public at the time of the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in late 2012.And? The Tyrants and Trojans in U.S. politics avoid the underlying issue of U.S. society, in which economic interests weigh more than the life and health of its people, while a culture of violence and hatred is installed. The possession of firearms and the use of violence as a first option are dangerously naturalized in U.S. society.

What is the use of a social and political system incapable of protecting its people, where individualism and exacerbated selfishness are rampant in their disregard for the life of others, where movies, series, games, literature, extol violence, while under a false concept of freedom, governments succeed each other without any real political will to stop the killing.

There is terror in the United States of America, they would do well to include themselves in their own State Sponsor of Terrorism List and take Cuba off where nothing like this ever happens.

Source: Rebelión, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US