Protesters face gunfighters shouting ‘killers’
“Murderers! Rogues!” Protesters yelled at members of the National Rifle Association outside the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston on Friday as the organization celebrates its first national convention in three years, suspended time and again because of the pandemic, in which the foreign press is on principle not. Some politicians and country musicians have preferred to cancel their attendance, aware that celebrating the guns is “not appropriate” at this time. It would be like dancing on the corpses of 19 children and two teachers from the Robb de Uvalde still in the morgue, but the gun’s powerful ‘lobby’ was not intimidated.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, an African-American Democrat, a lawyer, assured that it was not in his power to prevent it or revoke the permits because of the many legal implications this would have for the city. And so one and the other faced each other on both sides of the Avenida de las Américas before which the convention center opens. On the one hand, ready to weather the downpour, many Anglo-Saxons in dungarees, camouflage clothes and mirror glasses. On the other hand, in full sun, a more racially diverse group prayed for the “little souls” and didn’t hesitate to shout in Spanish. “They were children! murderers!
Steven McKensey, one of the conference attendees, was unfazed. “They are applying the first amendment to the Constitution (to freedom of expression) and we are trying to protect the second. We are the same”.
None of the interviewees felt guilty about what happened on Tuesday in Uvalde, where a teenager who bought two assault rifles as soon as he turned 18 shot an elementary school and slaughtered all the children and teachers in the class. “You won’t find a single person here who wouldn’t have done everything to stop it,” Ron Sasaki, who held a position in the pavilion, defended himself. His son, Jack, was even more passionate. ‘Here you have the best people in all of Texas, the most patriotic! When they played the national anthem this morning, there was no sound in the entire pavilion.
The “patriots” waited for their leader, Donald Trump, as the big star of the day. When he launched his presidential campaign in 2015, the tycoon was not his own. He talked about restricting guns and asking for criminal records before issuing a permit.
But the NRA was responsible for investing more than $30 million in the campaign of the only man who did not carry a gun or go hunting when he arrived at the White House, according to data from the Federal Election Commission. In all, an investigation by the McClatchy group’s papers put the powerful gun lobby’s electoral investment in 2016 at about $70 million, “and perhaps much more.”
The bet worked. Now Trump is also the only one to have attended five conventions in a row, even though the secret services made sure that there were no weapons during his speech this Friday. His message “Make America Great Again” evokes in his followers those golden days when no one harassed them or blamed them for shootings.
“The problem is that our society has moved away from Jesus Christ and lost the values that made us great,” the evangelical pastor Emma Trimble told this newspaper, after advising Uvalde’s mourners in the grace of God. “This is Texas, everyone here has guns to kill a snake, defend against illegal immigrants and all sorts of other things. What politicians need to do is correct the immigration laws.
And yes, this is Texas, the state that sells more than a million guns a year, “second only to California,” complained Governor Greg Abbott in a tweet last year, who can’t bear the idea that his state is lagging behind. in California as precious as guns. The governor, who canceled his attendance at the NRA convention this Friday with the excuse to visit Uvalde, on the eve of President Joe Biden, sent a video intervention so as not to disappoint his mentors. Under him, rules have been relaxed to the point that anyone over the age of 18 can buy an assault rifle and carry guns without a license since September last year.
‘Do you think it’s normal for an 18-year-old to buy a gun but not a beer? What kind of laws are those?” asked Edwin Rubio, a Houston resident, as a rhetorician. “And yes, then they blame the Democrats, video games, mental illness, but this is the only country where this is happening.” Faced with that quirk, the pastor chose to question it. “I’m not sure that’s true,” she said.
Saasaki and his son believe it would be worse for mentally unbalanced people to carry a knife, “because it’s easier to hide,” they defend. “Weapons don’t kill, just people. What’s needed is to keep mentally unbalanced people from carrying them.
How to determine that is another issue where reason is conspicuously absent, as 88% of Americans advocate requiring mental and criminal history on all gun sales, and yet NRA-funded politicians have prevented it. “When will we be able to face the gun lobbies?” President Biden lamented. The consensus is never.
Source: La Verdad
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