America’s obsessions with guns and violence terrifies its citizens, but it also reflects its own genocidal and racist past
After an 18-year-old gunman shot and killed 19 schoolchildren and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, President Biden took to the airwaves to address the nation in a speech full of sorrow and anger. “I just got off my trip from Asia, meeting with Asian leaders, and I learned of this [massacre] while I was on the aircraft,” he said. “And what struck me on that 17-hour flight – what struck me was these kinds of mass shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world.”
He’s right, of course. In 2018, CNN investigated school shootings worldwide between 2009 and 2018. The US, as it turns out, has “57 times as many shootings as the other six G7 countries combined”. What an appalling statistic.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
