On May 24, an 18-year-old high school student carrying an assault rifle killed 19 schoolchildren and two female teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, near the Mexican border. A few days earlier, an 18-year-old white supremacist had killed ten black people in Buffalo, in the northeastern United States.
These latest massacres, and the hundreds of shootings that do not make the headlines, have prompted new calls to take to the streets to demand better regulation of access to firearms. Hundreds of protests are planned in US cities, including the capital, Washington.
“It’s time to go back to the streets,” asks March for Our Lives, the movement founded by victims and survivors of the massacre in the high school in Parkland, Florida, which had already organized in stride, in March 2018, a huge demonstration in Washington.
“Show our elected officials that we demand and are entitled to a nation free from gun violence,” he wrote on his website.
“No matter who you are, walk with us,” one of the organization’s figures, David Hogg, said in a forum for Fox News on Friday.
“If we agree that killing children is unacceptable, then we must either prevent these people from getting their hands on weapons, or else act proactively so that they do not do so,” he wrote.
People “are fed up, and it’s time to push Congress to do something,” added the young man.
If polls indicate that a majority of Americans are in favor of more restrictions on the sale of firearms, the bulk of elected Republicans oppose it.
The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday a text which would prohibit, among other things, the sale of semi-automatic rifles to those under 21 and that of high-capacity magazines.
But he has almost no chance of passing the Senate, where the support of ten conservatives is necessary because of the rules of qualified majority.
At the same time, discussions are taking place between elected representatives of the two parties to try to find a compromise text likely to bring together the necessary majority.
