The actor hopes the school massacre in his hometown will lead to new gun control measures
Uvalde already has a face, a slogan and a symbol to fuel the political and social struggle for greater gun control. “Make their lives important,” actor Matthew McConaughey pleaded in the White House briefing room.
There was pain and anger in his voice. It was the emotions conveyed to him by the parents of the 19 murdered children at Robb Primary School, whom he and his wife Camila visited for a week. The small town of 16,000, an hour from the Mexican border, is also where McConaughey was born to a humble family. His mother taught the children at the nursery a short distance from the massacre.
In the audience, dressed in mourning and with watery eyes, his wife was holding a pair of green sneakers with a heart on the tip of her right foot, which 10-year-old Maite Rodriguez had painted on herself. She wanted Converse so badly that she wore them every day since her parents gave them. The color green represented his love for nature, his dream of studying biology at Corpus Christi University and living by the sea. His passion for the environment, the color of hope, but also something macabre: the destructive power of semi-automatic rifles, like the one Salvador Ramos used that day to shoot his victims.
“That green Converse at her feet turned out to be the only clear evidence to identify her,” the actor explained, holding back his anger. “What do you think of that?”
Those innocent bodies full of dreams that began to live were “so mutilated that only DNA tests and green Converse could identify them,” he explained, “because of the exceptionally wide exit hole an AR-15 had left.”
The town’s embalmers, who still repair bodies for vigils, told him they’d never had such a challenging job. “Many children were not only dead, but also hollow.”
Upon learning of the massacre, which was taking place in his town, the actor loaded his wife and three children into the car and drove three hours from Austin to offer his comfort to the victims. Many of those parents were grateful to be able to tell him their children’s stories, as if they were keeping them alive that way. McConaughey has brought them to Washington, with photos, letters and sneakers, to touch the hearts of politicians who are now discussing some measures of legislative scrutiny that prevent other massacres. “Make their lives important,” he repeated over and over, photo in hand.
In some cases he himself fulfilled the dreams of those shortened lives. Like that of Alithia, 10 years old, who dreamed of going to an art school in Paris and “showing her art to the world”. In the self-portrait McConaughey showed, the girl had a little friend on her head who watched her from the sky as she painted herself on that same doorstep. “You know, we never really talked to her about heaven, but it seems like she somehow knew,” her parents told her.
The actor, who claims to have been put on a Hollywood blacklist for thanking God for receiving an award, is confident that “it will be different this time”, not because those are helping souls from heaven, but because “it seems. There is a feeling that there is a viable way forward.
That path that would make the US “a safer country” would have to be found in Congress, which he headed after a brief meeting with Joe Biden at the White House. According to him, the parties are “at least” willing to sit down together to have a real conversation. As a “responsible” gun owner, raised in rural Texas, the actor embodies a bipartisan unity around the need to raise the legal age to 21 to purchase semi-automatic rifles, establish a waiting period to complete the purchase. , verifying criminal and psychiatric records, strengthening school safety and investing in mental health, he said.
“These regulations would not be a step backwards, but a step forward for civil society and even the second constitutional amendment” protecting the right to bear arms. The Republican opposition replies that they would not solve the problem. ‘Look, would it cure everything? No, hell no! But people are suffering and, despite how divided our country is, the issue of housewives’ responsibility is one we agree on more than what they lead us to believe,” he assured.
The violent shootings that make headlines around the world from schools, supermarkets or a church parking lot are just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, they only represent 1%, according to a study by the PEW Research Center. 43% are common crimes, which make society even more jaded.
The Republican opposition blames Democrat-appointed judges and prosecutors for this. One of the most progressive, Chesa Boudin, fell on Tuesday in a referendum organized to disqualify him. The so-called “recall” processes, which exist in California, leave the bitter taste of being able to expel a politician for fewer votes than he got when he was re-elected. In the case of the San Francisco District Attorney, whose parents were in prison for crimes related to the Weather Underground armed gang, 60% of the 123,000 votes cast in the city were for him to resign. .
The campaign succeeded in portraying him as “soft” on criminals and associating him with a series of high-profile crimes and robberies. Boudin believes he has been a scapegoat for Republicans to test nationally an electoral strategy to attack Democrats. The White House takes note.
Source: La Verdad
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