Yesterday’s armed attack with 22 dead in the city of Lewiston, in the northeastern US state of Maine is the deadliest of its kind in the US since August 2019, when a youth armed with an AK-47 opened fire on mostly Mexican and Latin American supermarket customers in El Paso, committing – according to authorities – a racist hate crime.
The deadliest gun attack in American history took place in Las Vegas in 2017, when a man in possession of several automatic rifles opened fire from a high-floor room at a Las Vegas hotel. Toll: 58 dead.
The US is paying an extremely heavy price for the widespread proliferation of weapons on its soil and the ease with which Americans can gain access to them.
The country has more guns (some 400 million) than residents, with one in three adults owning at least one gun and nearly one in two living in a household with at least one gun.
The consequence of their spread is the extremely high rate of deaths due to violent incidents with the use of weapons in the USA, which cannot be compared to those in other economically developed countries, as reported by international agencies and relayed by the Athens News Agency.
Not even counting suicides, more than 15,000 people have been killed by bullets in the country this year, according to the numbers of the specialist website Gun Violence Archive.
It is the so-called mass shootings – armed attacks with at least four victims, in the terminology of American law enforcement agencies – that shock the most and remain engraved in the memory of Americanswhile, each time, they highlight the vast ideological divide between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to how such tragedies should be prevented.
Recent American history is full of massacres of this nature, which leave absolutely no area of ​​everyday life unscathed: not workplaces, not churches, not supermarkets, not nightclubs, not public streets, not public transportation. , nor the schools.
Despite many mass mobilizations, including a million-plus protesters, over the years, the US Congress has never passed an ambitious gun bill, as many of its members are influenced by the powerful NRA gun lobby, the largest of its kind in America.
In this country, where gun ownership is considered by millions of citizens as their fundamental and inalienable constitutional rightthe only recent legislative advances have been quite marginal, notably expanding criminal and psychiatric background checks on would-be gun buyers.
Source: News Beast
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