Around 11:30 a.m. last Tuesday, a recently turned 18-year-old man entered an elementary school in Uvalde, a town in southern Texas, armed with an assault rifle and a pistol.
He got there after shooting his grandmother, with whom he lived.
He shot dead 19 children and two teachers.
The first identified victims were 10 years old.
The minors and their families had just celebrated the end of the year with a delivery of diplomas.
It shouldn't take emotional speeches, constitutional debates or analyzes of mental problems or drug addiction to know why the atrocity returned to the country.
The bottom line is that free access to firearms in the United States turns an insignificant episode of violence into a potential tragedy, allowing anyone to unleash scenes from countries at war in their city.
The feeling of horror and nonsense is multiplied when the victims are children.
But just 10 days before the event, another deranged radicalized online on paranoid racist theories walked into a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and shot 10 black people to death.
He was armed with an assault rifle and simply wanted to kill blacks.
There are more than 300 million guns in circulation in the United States.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, more than 7,600 people have been shot to death this year (excluding suicides), including more than 600 minors.
Mass murders go around the world, but the silent daily carnage occurs in the domestic sphere, in street crimes or in encounters with the police.
In 2020, more than 19,000 gun deaths were recorded and 21 million guns were sold.
An intricate and ancient network of interests between the arms industry and politics prevents any far-reaching reform of the laws: it is the expression of political impotence in the face of the predictability of new massacres.
The arms lobby clearly identifies with the Republican Party, but the Democrats have not historically dared to address the issue, which is cross-cutting at certain levels of voters, especially in rural areas.
The polarization of the US in this century has only exacerbated this perverse dynamic.
A bitter melancholy pervaded the words of Joe Biden when he meditated before the cameras: “Losing a child is like having a part of your soul ripped out.
There is an emptiness in your chest that you feel is going to engulf you and you will never be able to get out,” said a president who has lost two children.
And he added:
"In God's name, when are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?"
A law to require something as basic as a background check has been stuck in the Senate for two years because there are not 60 votes to even process it.
Nor can Biden regulate by decree something that affects constitutional issues.
Uvalde's is the second worst massacre in a school since Sandy Hook, in Newtown, Connecticut, a decade ago.
There died 20 children aged six and seven, plus six adults.
Since Barack Obama's tearful speech at the time, there have been more than 900 shootings in schools.
Today there is commotion in the United States, but no significant political movement that prevents us from being faced with a new shooting in a short time that will cover the memory of Uvalde and the macabre ritual will begin again in the face of the failure of the regulation of weapons in the United States .
