"You have to be prepared!" Says the seventh father of a family who uses Saturdays fine-tuning marksmanship in an assorted Oklahoma City armory . He, the mother and the middle-aged son, carry cases with ammunition. "Boy, you never know," he smiles with camaraderie. A few hours have been fogged in the shed, where the shooting tracks are located. It is a long-established habit. First, the sanitized plugs are received with which to withstand the noise of a score of shooters and then, the kind employees of the armory offer a poster with which to cover the target: of a cartoon of the dictator of North Korea or of a clown -psicokiller with two grenades in the hands. You have to be prepared to shoot!
In Oklahoma, one of the states with the highest number of gun deaths in the entire Union is legalized - and socially admitted - to carry a gun in places of worship, in churches. You can go armed to the supermarket and leave , in the car you can go with a gun and leave, in the houses there are spaces dedicated to the accumulation of weapons and, thus next to the garage, the neighbor can have an arsenal as part of his upset citizen awareness.
This way of life has inoculated tension in social relations, with deadly events whose spark ignites in trivial discussions, already in the drive-in of a Taco Bell already buying at Walmart. These bloody episodes, local, do not cross the media frontiers as if they do the killings of shooters. But they leave a trail of misfortunes and mark the coexistence. There are neither respected voices nor great criticisms that arise in the matter in some areas of the country. A West of landscapes is forged and with a robust economy that accumulates weapons. Increasingly: The United States has gone from 170 million in the hands of civilians in 1990 to brush twice that number 29 years later .
The issue and its deadly effects are not among the main concerns of millions of Americans. In the neighboring enormity of Texas - Steinbeck joked that Texans do not know they can leave their state - weekends training is held only for women. They offer the appeal of living a "relaxed atmosphere" (hitting outdoor shots, it is understood) and even learning to reach a moving target from a helicopter.
In that equivocal American simplicity that projected stable states in their voting preferences (Red States, such as Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia ...), President Trump has consolidated his position. Its best flaws , improvisation and lawlessness, are interpreted as determination and effectiveness; his outbursts, provocations, contempt for the most disadvantaged and persecutions of the different, considered by his agitated supporters as shavings of an undeniable policy. To the lack of social coverage, to the attempts to liquidate the weak Obamacar and, to the assaults on the Supreme Court, to run over parliamentary norms, to contempt of the Federal Budget, to the constant growth of the public debt, use the economic data As the only true truth. Republican voters boast with these percentages, although many of them Trump continue to cause rashes for a matter of, oops, decency.
In its devastating step, the United States abandons the Treaty of Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (1987) without tying or designing a broader one and the new situation propitiates between its allies and enemies the opportunity to arm itself nuclearly; Undertakes a trade war with China - the US Chamber of Commerce itself has warned that Americans will pay when applying tariffs to almost all imported products - and ignores climate change , despite the warnings of some sensible advisers who, as in a lion's cage, they will talk to him when he is asleep.
The great challenges facing the world are mute to Trump voters, challenges far from the center of the debate, as was the case with nuclear tests that were practiced in forgotten places in New Mexico during the twentieth century.
The economic data, on which the political surveys are based - like those of the popular Nate Silver -, encourage to think about a reelection; Ben Labolt , responsible for communication in the Obama campaign in 2012, has inquired for The Atlantic in Trump's playbook . For months, the announcements of his candidacy take over main spaces on Facebook and YouTube, shielding his voters and anticipating a reaction from the Democrats. Daniel W. Drezner writes that not everything will be so easy: the economy will get worse and neither the Democrats nor the moderate voters will tolerate the apathy of 2016 in the face of the abyss of a second term. Maybe, but for now he has an advantage.
To the permanent campaign, of which Sidney Blumenthal spoke in 1982 as "an uninterrupted process to rig public resources in order to perpetuate himself in the government", today a saturated journalistic structure of large corporations and formats that promote noise, simplistic analyzes and a dizzy spectacularization of stupid statements. The political consultant Mike Murphy - as recalled in the book The Permanent Campaign (Norman Ornstein / Thomas E. Mann, editors) - imagined that the Lincolnian speech of Gettysburg would have occurred in these years. And he thought the coverage would hardly be a "sound cut immediately subsumed by the boastful comments of a reporter." Thus the climatic threat, the nuclear danger and any relevant issue but out of the presidential political interest are blurred. Fundamental issues that could bring out of their isolation campaign joyfully uninformed voters through cable and social networks.
It is the world, according to Trump, a passing aberration, as Paul Starr argues, or a far-reaching phenomenon, such as the relationship of Americans with weapons.
Francisco Reyero is a journalist. His last book is Y Bernardo de Gálvez entered Washington (Unicaja Foundation, 2019).
@reyeropaco
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