The difference between buying a gun and shooting it at school

That the United States has a problem with gun laws is beyond question.

And that the right to possess firearms that its Constitution enshrines is related to the fact that it is the only country in the world in which massacres are recurrent in schools and institutes is unquestionable.

Now, in addition to insisting on the urgent regulation of the sale of firearms, I think it is pertinent to ask ourselves what is happening in the schools of that country.

The answer to the question of why a young American can come to school with an assault rifle lies in the law.

However, the question of why he decides to pull the trigger is undoubtedly more complex and goes beyond the crucial regulation of weapons.

After all, young people and guns are everywhere in America, but the horror always happens in the place that should be the safest: the school.

And furthermore, it does not happen in the form of an accident —the foreseeable consequence of selling weapons to the youngest—, but in the form of a massacre, mass murders perpetrated by schoolchildren and which increase every year in a country where going to school involves the risk of death.

So I allow myself to think about what these schools are like and how education and identity are being articulated in a society that is, on too many occasions, the spearhead of what will be ours.

And when thinking about American education, it is mandatory to focus on absolute competitiveness and its way of focusing education on a filter of elites, in order to distance them from an increasingly diminished middle class and all the people who will be excluded from any horizon or well-being.

Thus, a really complex system of social stratification is built where the poor or the unfortunate feel that they have no right to be happy.

This does not mean that the rich or "the popular of the

may become happier than others, but there are those who have the prerogative to become happy and those from whom this possibility has been taken away since they were children.

Any North American child or young person has to accumulate a great amount of tension in order to have the right to happiness, not just an instant of happiness but the mere right to achieve it, which is not given, much less, of course, in the education of girls and boys.

The tension and emotional stress is so great that being a teenager can become an unbearable psychosocial challenge.

The North American series inspired by school life show this, where young people learn a complex system of emotional stratification that goes far beyond the old social classes.

Thus, a poisonous cocktail made from their physical appearance, their social class, their sexuality or their intellectual abilities will result in a supposed place on the social scale,

In this way, an aspirational ceiling is built (always linked to success) that many and many feel over their heads and that on too many occasions is so low that it directly threatens their psychic well-being.

Whoever needs to corroborate this thesis has only to turn on any audiovisual platform and consume the story with which the United States feeds its children (and ours).

There are titles like

perfect synthesis of the drama of living;

, high school mystery with underage murders, gangs, rape, and classism usually woven into frivolous school fiction, or

, where a young woman explains the causes of her suicide in each of the episodes for people over 18 years of age that are devastating among minors… Or, if you prefer, randomly choose any comedy or production for adolescent audiences that we can see on Netflix, Disney Channel, HBO or Amazon Prime.

American fiction for young people (including cartoons) is always a way of staging why some have to have a lot so that others have nothing.

The obvious question is how many people (how many children) does a system like this throw in the trash.

A reality where competition is no longer between those who aspire to be "the best", but between those who may have a horizon and those who "will be nothing" for the rest of their lives.

An unbearable battle between the best and the nobody.

Who has doubts about it can see

the film by Rebel Wilson that sweeps Netflix (it has been among the most watched in Spain since its premiere) and in which this system of emotional stratification is staged with sociological precision.

Of course, his viewers are not anthropologists, but wounded teenagers.

The gun thing is happening in schools and it's happening to children.

It is happening in the heart of the social integration of a country where the tension is maximum.

And we are seeing this tension come into our lives and our children, who do not have rifles, but everything else.

We can already feel it in children and especially in adolescents: in their pain, in their fatigue, in the psychiatric units overcome, in eating disorders, depressions, anxiety and in all the damage they suffer and endure for the mere fact to socialize and live among us.

Hospitalizations for self-harm in the population aged 10 to 24 have almost quadrupled in recent decades.

I dare to say, well,

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