15 July 2024

Is America’s gun fixation backfiring on its pushers?

 Al Jazeera English

It was a shot heard round the world – but most of all by presidential candidate Donald Trump, the victim of Saturday’s assassination attempt at a presidential rally in the US state of Pennsylvania.

A bullet grazed Trump’s right ear as he was filling the audience in on his plans to make United States immigration policy even more hellish for refuge seekers. One crowd member was killed in the gunfire and two others wounded. The shooter, identified by the FBI as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot and killed by Secret Service officers.

The episode will no doubt earn Trump substantial points among supporters, who will be ever more convinced that their hero is under existential attack in his sociopathic quest to “Make America Great Again”.

And while much of the analysis in the aftermath of the Pennsylvania rally has focused on the “polarisation” of the US citizenry, it is also worth pointing out the bleeding obvious – that firearms-related bloodshed would not transpire with such regularity if the country did not have more guns than people. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH