After the Texas school massacre, the astonishment speech

“Mourning and stupor”, this is how the reactions of American society are described following 18 children and 2 teachers were shot by a teenager who was carrying an automatic assault weapon, with which he spread horror and death until he was shot by the police .

Stupor, “exaggerated astonishment or surprise that prevents a person from speaking or reacting.” The one in Texas was the last of 213 mass shootings unleashed in the US in the 145 days that have passed since 2022, according to the organization Gun Violence Archive. That is, more than one per day. Balance: in that period 17,196 people were shot dead. We are not halfway through the year yet. In 2021 Americans were shocked 692 times by the shooting deaths of 20,920 people. With those numbers, it is hard to believe that there is surprise and astonishment. Rather it seems that surprise, stupor, flag at half-staff are part of the same discourse that establishes as logic that the boy who entered the school with an assault weapon was a “misfit.”

The police defined the author of the latest massacre as a “lone shooter”. What loneliness can be assumed from someone who imitated 212 “lone” shooters who anticipated him in less than half a year? It is difficult to believe in the marginality of a young person, no matter how many adaptation problems he may have, when the social space, the culture to which he supposedly cannot adapt confirms his full adaptation: he legally bought weapons as anyone can buy them. He announced them on the networks. He was one of the 213 who decided to use what the culture fostered by specific policies provides as a solution to their problems, despite the fact that the armed solution has caused more than 17,000 deaths. How many of those deaths, even, will have been part of families that support the use of weapons in civil society?

As American society wrestles with its own ghosts, its president, Joe Biden, wonders “when in God’s name will we be able to confront the gun lobby?” Confront, a word complicated by the senses that literally shoots in the north country. Confront the lobby as it ships weapons to Ukraine. The discourse of the arms lobby reaches everywhere, and transcends the borders of what is supposed to be the stale and extreme right.

The promotion of the use of weapons, at whatever level, civilian, security forces, armies, always goes hand in hand with State discourses, which function fueled by interests in which it is practically impossible to separate the political from the business. But it impacts society, its culture. As much as possible to solve problems. From this South, we are not alien.

A few days ago the trial for the Napalpí Massacre ended. During the hearings, historians and researchers pointed out the participation of armed civilians and recalled the clamor of the rural producers of Chaco calling for police or, failing that, “weapons” to defend themselves once morest the raiders.

Malones that only existed in the state discourse of “patriotic” extension of borders and liberation of the lands secularly occupied by the indigenous populations for the exploitation of landowners. Of course, the raiders were threatening to justify their extermination. Much of society believed the speech. Otherwise, almost 100 years would not have passed before it was publicly dismantled.

We are one Milei, one Bullrich, from the culture of the United States.