In December, I flew from the Mexican state of Oaxaca – where I have been residing since the onset of the pandemic – to the US state of Kentucky, where my parents recently moved. On the ride from the Louisville airport to my parents’ apartment, I passed a billboard advertising an upcoming gun show on January 1 and 2.
A website promoting the event offered enticing details: “If you are a gun collector or are a hunting enthusiast, the gun show at the Kentucky Fair & Expo Center in Louisville… is a great place to spend some time”. In addition to guns, military surplus items would also be available for purchase, and children aged six to 12 received a discounted ticket price of $4 – or $6.50 for the “VIP” children’s ticket, which exempted its holder from waiting in lines.
I fled the country again on January 1 and was, therefore, unable to attend the show, but the billboard and the ubiquitous gun shops in Louisville – from Skull Firearms to Everything Concealed Carry to Gunz Inc – had constituted a marked change from the landscape south of the border. As the Louisville Courier-Journal itself notes, the entire country of Mexico “has just one gun store and issues fewer than 50 gun permits a year”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.