Has what looks to the rest of the world like a fanatical gun culture diminished the United States as a beacon of civilization? This editorial from Mexico’s La Jornada asserts that thanks to special interests like the gun lobby, ‘the ominous inertia so prevalent in the politics, economy and culture of that country’ is making the U.S. more dangerous to itself and other nations – particularly Mexico.
The La Jornada editorial says in part:
It is estimated that there are almost 300 million individually-owned firearms in the United States – almost one per person – and on a daily basis, on average more than 80 people die from assaults committed with such weapons. The possession of firearms – illegal or not – on the part of resident of that nation is also fueled by the determined support of reactionary and chauvinistic segments of U.S. society, such as the National Rifle Association (NRA), an ultra-conservative organization closely tied to the Republican Party, which has dedicated itself to opposing any government attempt to regulate the trade in firearms. What happened at the theater in Colorado coincides with the discussion in the United States over the adoption of a treaty among U.N. member states to better-regulate the international trade in conventional arms [The U.N. Arms Trade Treaty]. This has been portrayed by the NRA as an attempt on the part of Obama to limit the aforementioned constitutional provision
Events like yesterday’s exhibit, in short, the devastating effects of an anachronistic and deadly approach to gun control that prevails in the United States that amounts to the reproduction, on a national scale, of the “law of the jungle” that Washington has sought to impose on the world. The lack of ability or willingness of the Obama Administration to regulate and contain the sale of weapons not only periodically results in a nation in mourning, it affects other nations like ours – remember the massive smuggling of weapons from the United States into Mexico under Operation Fast and Furious.
The Colorado massacre is further of evidence that the current U.S. government has been defeated by the ominous inertia so prevalent in the politics, economy and culture of that country, which sees itself as a great champion of civility for the rest of the world, but which instead finds itself a more backward place thanks to its systematic tendency toward violence and barbarism.
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