Given their frequency, the shootings that leave several or many civilians casualties are no longer news in the United States. They only have space in the news when they involve some very exceptional circumstances.

Such were the circumstances on the morning of August 26 when TV reporter Alison Parker was interviewing –live for the local TV station WDBJ of Moneta, Virginia– a person who spoke about the importance of economic development for the community and, suddenly, there were shots and desperate screaming. Parker, 24, and the cameraman recording the interview, Adam Ward, 27, were shot.

When captured by police a few hours later, the murderer, Vester Lee Flanagan, committed suicide and died in hospital. A while before the act, he had posted on his Facebook profile a video he took at the time of the crime. According to initial investigations, labor discrepancies with the TV station had been the cause of the multiple murders.

It is extremely difficult to understand how in the United States weapon manufacturershave succeeded in imposing rules for the possession and use of firearms that keep alive the business of selling weapons to the population. It is one of the most lucrative businesses in the country despite the countless misfortunes that firearms bring to US society.

The cult of firearms in the United States has gone to extremes that contradict common sense and the most elementary standards for citizen security. This is the result of a mixture of very contradictory interpretations of the Second Amendment of the Constitution manipulated by the powerful congressional lobby known as the National Rifle Association (NRA), the greed of entrepreneurs willing to sell to citizens more lethal weapons to make money, and the whims of politicians at the White House and Congress who succumb to the lavish money spread by such interests and support their ambitions.

The .50 caliber rifle is a weapon of war capable of bringing down an airplane and piercing the defenses of armored vehicles. It has a high shooting accuracy at the distance of a mile.  It has no use in sports, or hunting; but can be bought in forty of the fifty states of the Union (except in California) as an ordinary gun.

The House of Representatives has approved the export of this deadly weapon and allowed its domestic legal sale. This has led activist groups and the few journalists who oppose the expansion of firearm sales to people to predict that before long these rifles will be used in acts of terrorism and against US troops deployed by the government throughout the world performing the “anti-terrorist” war, or promoting the version of democracy Washington imposes in its relations with other nations by means of government-induced changes.

The harmful social effect of firearms extends as an epidemic across US borders to several neighboring countries. Mainly to Mexico, a nation where –although the origin of the problem is of its own making– the smuggling of lethal weapons that are legally sold in the United States has dramatically complicated the fight against mafias, and is deeply involved with illicit drug, human trafficking, and smuggling in general.

We must not lose sight of the fact that the massive firearm possession among the US population to some extent explains the aggressiveness of the police, forced to defend from an unlimited number of potential armed assailants. Although the number of civilians killed by police officers each year in the United States is not known; it is known that in 2014 police have killed a number of people that doubles the number of US citizens killed in mass shootings since 1982 in the entire American nation.

An ordinary US citizen is nine times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.

We can see a most unfortunate contradiction in the fact that a significant part of the more aware public favors the massive possession of weapons as a way to press against the abuses of the oligarchy; and the oligarchy –one of its most influential members being the group of congressional lobbying NRA– rows in the same direction.

August 29, 2015

- Manuel E. Yepe, http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.