Every day there are new unforgettable details about Tuesday’s massacres in Uvalde.
The eleven-year-old girl who smeared her classmate’s blood on herself and played dead to survive. A trick that we usually associate with the trenches from the First World War, not from an elementary school class.
The man who lost his wife for 24 years – a teacher at the school in Uvalde – and who was paralyzed by grief himself died in a heart attack two days later.
After the worst massacre Since the Sandy Hook bombing in 2012, the American people do not seem to be content with the usual clichés about “thoughts and prayers” from Texas Republicans.
The state’s influential senator Ted Cruz has been persecuted by protesters who have questioned his defense of the arms industry and Texas gun laws.
In a noticed TV interview Cruz is confronted by Mark Stone, a British journalist from Sky News, who refuses to accept the Texassenator’s rehearsed platitudes.
– Why does this only happen in your country? I think that’s what people all over the world can not understand. Why is this only happening in the United States? asks Stone.
Cruz waves away the question that Stone has a “political agenda” and finally hurries away from the camera.
The interview would probably never have spread around the world if it ended there.
But instead, the journalist follows Cruz and continues to ask follow-up questions: Why is the United States the only country in the world where this happens all the time?
Cruz finally has nothing to say.
Noticeably upset and exhausted at arguments, he stands in front of the camera, thinks for a while and then comes up with a nationalist tirade:
– Why do people from all over the world come to the United States? Because this is the freest, richest and safest country in the world, says Cruz.
In fact, there is no rich country in the world where so many people die from gun violence as in the United States.
Cruz’s message is more reminiscent than anything else of the nationalist tirades we usually hear from the Chinese Communist Party. It is the same kind of indignant nationalism, as if all criticism of the homeland were a personal attack.
That Cruz expresses himself so this is ironic, because he built his entire political career on being in opposition to the communist regime in China and especially Cuba, from which his own father fled in the 1950s.
Cruz often cites China and Cuba as contrasts with the United States.
Few Republicans in Congress have so stubbornly criticized China’s communist regime and so consistently accused them of the global pandemic. Cruz, for example, always calls covid-19 the “Wuhan virus”.
But in Texas, when the arguments faded, he finally sounded like an echo of the very aggressive communication strategy used by the Chinese government.
After the massacre in Uvalde For example, criminologists and experts on gun violence have pointed out that the sheer amount of serious weapons in the United States is the most plausible reason why these attacks continue to take place every week in the country.
There are now almost 400 million weapons here, making it the only country in the world with more weapons than inhabitants. At the same time, the number of American households owning weapons has decreased. So instead we are seeing more and more and more serious weapons in fewer and fewer households – a radicalization of gun ownership.
It is also possible to see a clear increase in gun violence after several bans on, for example, semi-automatic rifles were lifted.
Ted Cruz has himself, along with party colleagues in Texas, have been at the forefront of this kind of gun laws.
Following the Uvalde massacre, Cruz and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott have sought to shift the debate from weapons to mental illness.
But Republicans in Texas have in recent years made sharp cuts precisely in support of the mentally ill.
Last month, Texas cut $ 211 million from the annual budget of the agency that provides mental health programs.
The confrontation with Sky News was a rare example of a Texas Republican being forced to answer for his actions.