The US arms lobby on Monday praised the “heroic” acts of a civilian who shot a killer in a shopping mall with his pistol, using the event to further his cause despite statistics showing the devastating effects of proliferation. of firearms.
On Sunday night, Jonathan Sapirman, a 20-year-old man whose motive is still unknown, opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle in the doorways of a shopping center in Indiana.
A story taken over by the powerful NRA lobby
He killed a 30-year-old man and a couple sitting in a restaurant space and wounded two, before being shot and killed by Elisjsha Dicken, a 22-year-old customer who was carrying a handgun without a license as recently authorized by local law. .
“Many more people would have been killed last night if this armed and responsible citizen had not reacted very quickly, two minutes after the first shots were fired,” Greenwood Police Chief James Ison said in a conference call.Press.
The shooter, who appears to have staged his actions since he drowned his phone in the toilet and burned his computer in an oven before taking action, did in fact have a second assault rifle, a handgun and plenty of ammunition, it revealed.
The powerful lobby of the National Rifle Association (NRA) immediately took advantage of this tragedy to reaffirm that arming the population was good for public safety. “We say it again: The only way to stop a poorly armed person is to arm a good person,” he tweeted.
The sea serpent of arms in the United States
Another association for the defense of the right to bear arms, the CCRKBA, has assumed the same credo: “We carry arms to defend ourselves and to defend others from criminals and the insane,” its head Alan Gottlieb declared in a statement.
“Let’s be clear: If guns made us safer, America would be the safest country in the world,” said Kris Brown, president of the Brady Campaign, which campaigns for better gun oversight.
Along the same lines, Shannon Watts, founder of the organization Moms Demand Action, reproduced graphs that place the United States at the head of developed countries in terms of weapons per capita but also deaths from firearms.
More guns in circulation than people in America
Nearly 400 million guns were in circulation among the US civilian population in 2017, or 120 guns per 100 people, according to the Small Arms Survey project.
More than 24,000 people have been shot to death since the start of the year, including 13,000 by suicide, according to the Gun Violence Archive website, which recorded 354 shootings during the period that killed at least four people.
Several of them, in a Texas school or a supermarket frequented by African-Americans, especially shocked the country, whose elected officials, for the first time in 30 years, managed to agree on a -modest- reform of gun laws in June.
Source: BFM TV
