“Country of blood. A History of Gun Violence in the United States” (Bloodbath Nation), by Paul Auster, translated from English (United States) by Anne-Laure Tissut, photographs by Spencer Ostrander, Actes Sud, 208 p. , €26.
Orlando, Sandy Hook, Sutherland Springs, Uvalde… We could continue the enumeration for a long time, until filling the entire space of this article with a litany of the places of massacres and shootings in the United States. The “records” in this area are exceeded with overwhelming regularity: in 2022, a new peak, for example, 51 schools, colleges and high schools were the scene of shootings, against 35 the previous year. If we add up all the mass shootings, suicides and ordinary crime, every day nearly 100 people are shot dead in the country, where 393 million firearms are in circulation. A phenomenon of such magnitude that one wonders what can still be written to account for it.
A family secret
What can words do against bullets? Paul Auster chose to mix registers to try to answer this question. country of blood is first and foremost a political essay and advocacy, nourished by an ambivalent personal experience. For a long time, the New York writer thought he was one of the populations spared: urban, educated, only knowing revolvers and rifles from the representations of the westerns of his childhood. Until the revelation of a family secret, that of the shooting of his paternal grandfather, in 1919, by his grandmother. From then on made sense to him “the interiority so troubled” of his father and, more broadly, of the wider circle of victims, those “whose body was never hit by the bullets but who continue to suffer internal injuries caused by the loss: a mutilated sister, a brother with brain damage, a dead father”.
To this intimate story the author adds more conventional passages based on works such as those of the jurists Adam Winkler (Gunfight2011, untranslated) and Michael Waldman (The Second Amendment. A Biography, 2014, untranslated), to put into perspective the exceptionality of the relationship to arms of the United States, since the time of the so-called Wild West. If nothing new appears in these pages, they correctly underline the paradoxes of the end of the 1960s, in a context of anxiety of the white middle and working classes in the face of the civil rights movement and the racial riots. It was partly because the Black Panther Party then claimed the right to self-defense with firearms that lobbyists from the National Rifle Association and white nationalists took up this argument. A series of Supreme Court decisions have since only consolidated this maximalist reading of the Constitution’s Second Amendment. The right to bear arms has in fact very often become a license to kill.
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