Recently, a teenager executed 21 children and teachers at a Texas school. Recently, children were raising shotguns in Arbeca (Lleida).
Our society sometimes plays at being a judge. We shout and hit the table when we know the indignity. Hunger, poverty, wars, forced exiles, massacres and climate disasters are stirring our consciences and we seem publicly angry. But very often we stop looking at our own shortcomings as a collectivity. We forget that we are not so far from the misfortunes that are happening on the other side of the world.
Last May, an 18-year-old man wielded several assault rifles and cold-bloodedly executed 21 children and teachers at a Texas school and reopened the debate on gun use in the United States. It helped us to reject the culture of the American arms culture, calling it a country where it seems that a machine gun is as necessary as a sandwich. And this anger covers our eyes at such close scenes that make us shudder.
Without going too far, in the Arbeca Hunter Fair (in Lleida, Catalonia), I saw (and photographed) children aiming with shotguns. And I'm sure it's not a one-time event. We also have weapons integrated into our society, although we don't believe it. You only have to look at the schoolyards when sometimes boys and girls play to kill themselves with their fingers in the shape of pistols.
We believe we are judges but will takes us a few generations to get rid of our Rambo mirroring. And that should start with something seemingly as simple as preventing guns from being a part of our daily lives. Even at an innocent hunter-gatherer fair.
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