Watching the rudder turn during a brigantine sail, Samuel Colet had the idea that revolutionized the world of weapons: the rotating drum that allows up to six shots without having to manually reload the weapon. Since, in addition to inventing the revolver, Colt industrialized it, his company became one of the giants that fueled nineteenth-century North American capitalism. And even today he makes weapons; among them the AR-15, an assault rifle with which a Texas teenager entered an elementary school and massacred nineteen children and two teachers. Oliver Winchester he was another of those who amassed fortunes manufacturing weapons that accompanied the territorial expansion of the Union. His industry made the rifle that is reloaded by operating a lever located below the trigger.
Colt and Winchester they left behind the blunderbusses, arquebuses and muskets that had to be manually reloaded after each shot. And in the 19th century there were other inventors of weapons turned industrialists, such as Horace Smith and Daniel Wessoninitiating the arms culture that comes tragically to the present day.
That culture was shaped in the “far and wild west”that “far and wild west” whose conquest is known throughout the world thanks to cowboy movies, the cowboys who fought against the Indians on whose land they set up their haciendas.
While in countries like Argentina, the army was the exclusive protagonist of the expansion campaign that annihilated indigenous people, in United States Westward Expansion it was done through civilians. The State gave them title to parcels located in the territories of Apaches, Comanches, and other native peoples. Cowboys protected property and livestock with their own weapons.
That model of territorial expansion through civilians had begun with the settlers who began to enter the continent from the thirteen colonies on the East Coast. When the British crown wanted to tax them for the lands that they had conquered with their weapons, they used those weapons to defend themselves from what they considered a plunder. And when the European metropolis wanted to take away their weapons, the first sparks of independence flew.
The culture of arms was maintained but its consequences changed. The weapons were increasing their lethality. The first great leap in the 20th century was made by John Thompsonby designing the machine gun that bears his name and was used by both FBI agents and mafias in the Prohibition decade.
The first massacres took place with these portable submachine guns, due to the possibility of launching bursts of bullets with each trigger. But the shootings that left many dead were carried out by law enforcement officers and members of organized crime.
It was only in the 1970s that the nightmare of individuals entering an exterminating trance without a specific motivation began to repeat itself, because it is a scourge that has nothing to do with crime or terrorism, but with psychological pathologies and social.
At first, the exterminators were ex-combatants who returned with emotional imbalances from Korea and Vietnam. War traumas explained the epidemic of massacres in the beginning. But the pathologies diversified and the massacres multiplied. What did not change were the laws on access to weapons of war that always lead the bloodletting: the Second Constitutional Amendment established in 1791.
For this reason, each massacre generates debates about the legislation that puts assault rifles within the reach of deranged people who, due to drug use, the influence of conspiracy theories or racism, xenophobia or whatever, shoot at unarmed crowds. And those debates repeat their frustrating developments.
First, under the effect of fear, the indignant voices demand what common sense indicates: weapons of war should only be used in the Armed Forces and should not be available to civilians. But soon, the debate dissipates like the smoke of the shots and only explodes again when the next massacre takes place.
Thomas Paine was one of the key thinkers in North American independence, because when he published his famous Common Sense essay in 1776, explained to the people the logic of confronting institutions, laws and traditions when they have negative effects on society. The same logic today shows as criminal action that of the arms lobbies and their accomplices, the congressmen who defend an absurd and brutal status quo. Although the laws do not yet say so, pressure groups such as the National Rifle Association (RNA) are criminal associations. Legislators, mostly conservatives, also whose electoral campaigns finance those pressure groups.
That the RNA has held its annual convention in Houston, that is, in the state where 19 children and two teachers were riddled days before with the weapons it defends, shows the cruel coldness of that lobby that has Republican standard-bearers like Donald Trump and the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott.
Both repeat as if it were logical something as delirious as that the solution is that teachers and professors go to class armed to repel the attackers with bullets.
The lobbies and their accomplices always talk as if the sale of all kinds of weapons is being discussed, knowing that only automatic and semi-automatic weapons that can fire bursts of bullets are objected to.
Abbott and his supporters, like Trump, consider that the legality of abortion is “life-threatening” but fervently defend the trade that made the United States the only country where there are more weapons than inhabitants and where massacres are common, because psychological and social disorders converge with access to weapons of war.
It is also the only country where you can go to demonstrations carrying weapons of war. Dozens of ultraconservatives did it two years ago who took over Congress in the city of Lansing to protest, wielding assault rifles, against the governor’s health policies Michigan Democrat Gretchen Whitmer.
Surely, the crowd that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to destroy the electoral process and turn Trump into an autocrat also defends access to all kinds of weapons.
To the America of the “common sense” who wants to ban weapons of war and the America that applauded Trump at the delirious RNA convention, are separated by a mighty river of blood.
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