Uonce more, in the United States, the distressing return of the same. On May 24, in Uvalde, a small town in Texas, an 18-year-old teenager named Salvador Ramos killed nineteen children from Robb Elementary School, as well as two adults, with an assault rifle. Ten days earlier, Payton Gendron, also 18, had murdered ten people in a supermarket in Buffalo (New York State). This type of attack is repeated over and over again, 61 shootings took place in 2021 [dans des zones peuplées], according to the FBI. The love of guns is a serious American disease.
The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, a document fetishized to the point of absurdity – as if a legal text were in essence above any modification -, clearly stipulates that“A well-organized militia being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms will not be infringed”. Very good. Let us simply recall that this text dates from 1791 and that it in no way designates the current weapons endowed with an unimaginable power at the time. However, and apart from the Democratic Party, the question does not interest many people in the United States, especially not the members of the Republican Party, and even less those of the National Rifle Association, outstanding lobbyists for the ideal of weapons for all.
This state of affairs, I had the opportunity to see myself. With the idea of making a book of it later, I, after much difficulty, succeeded in integrating a school of snipers raging on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona. Many might judge the experience preposterous, but I continued the same immersion approach as the one I had undertaken with the homeless in Paris in the early 2000s. As an anthropologist, I deeply believe that we don’t understand what we haven’t experienced directly. So I presented myself as an arms fanatic, disgusted at not being able to give free rein to my passion in Europe. And so I was accepted into one of the best remote assassin schools in the world.
Excess and caricatures
During two stays, in 2012 and 2016, I followed three courses there and have the diplomas of sniper / counter-sniper, advanced sniper and instructor who attest to it. It was to plunge there into deep America, that of all the caricatures and all the excesses. Pick-up trucks circulate there en masse, a gun hanging from the rear window, just behind the driver’s head. Similarly, it is considered the highest chic to carry a discreet handgun coiled in his cowboy boot or, more obviously obvious and therefore more virile, to have a Smith & Wesson stuck in the belt of his jeans .
You have 73.86% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.