A committee of the House of Representatives criticizes the “irresponsibility” of these companies, which “prefer their income over the lives of their compatriots”
The increase in violence in the United States is related to the increase in income from the arms industry. Five companies that sell “military-style assault weapons to civilians” have made more than $1 billion in the past decade, the House Oversight and Reform Committee said, during hearings on weapons oversight and regulation following the country’s latest shootings. destroyed. .
Uvalde, Illinois, Philadelphia… These are some of the states where an armed person attacked innocents. Many families have lost everything in these tragic events. Who is partially to blame? The commission is clear: these kinds of companies ran “manipulative marketing campaigns” to connect masculinity with the purchase of guns. In this way they have “benefited” from violence. “The gun industry has flooded our neighborhoods, our schools, and even our churches and synagogues with these deadly weapons, and got rich with them,” said committee chair Carolyn B. Maloney. And it is that, in the case of some manufacturers, as reported by The Washington Post newspaper, their income has doubled or tripled in recent years. “They choose their profits over the lives of their compatriots. This is beyond irresponsible,” Maloney said.
The CEOs of two of the weapons manufacturers who appeared before the committee on Capitol Hill defended their products, pointing out that the real problem is not the weapons themselves, but the people who can use them to inflict mass slaughter. “Mass shootings were almost unheard of a few decades ago. So what has changed? No firearms,” said Marty Daniel, CEO of Daniel Defense, the manufacturer of the weapons involved in the Uvalde Primary School massacre last May, leaving 19 children and two teachers killed, and the other, a deadly attack. in Las Vegas in 2017 – sixty people were killed –. He called these tragic events “purely evil” and “unreasonable”, among other attacks of this type that have taken place in the country, stating that “our nation’s response should focus not on the type of weapon, but on the type of people. that they are likely to commit mass shootings.”
Also at the hearing was Christopher Killoy, president and CEO of Ruger & Co, who “recognized the tension between our constitutional right to own firearms and the harm done by criminals who acquire them,” although he assured the latter should not occur. that the former. “It is wrong to deprive citizens of their constitutional right to buy the legal firearms they want because of the criminal acts of bad people,” he said bluntly. “A firearm can be used for good or evil. The difference is in the intent of the person who owns it, and we believe it should be the focus of any investigation into the root causes of criminal gun violence.”
Source: La Verdad
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