The writer mixes intimate story and political essay to plead against violence by firearm in his country. In vain?
by André Loez (historian and collaborator of the “world of books”)
Orlando, Sandy Hook, Sutherland Springs, Uvalde … We could continue the list for a long time, to fill all the space of this article with a litany of places of massacres and killings by firearms in the United States . The “records” in this area are exceeded with an overwhelming regularity: in 2022, new summit, for example, 51 schools, colleges and high schools were the scene of fire, against 35 the previous year. If all the mass shootings are added, suicides and ordinary crime, it is almost 100 people every day who are shot in the country, where 393 million firearms are in circulation. A phenomenon of such magnitude that one comes to wonder what can still be written to account for it.
a family secret
What can words against bullets? Paul Auster chose to mix the registers to try to answer this question. Pays de Blood is first of all the political essay and advocacy, nourished by an ambivalent personal experience. For a long time, the New York writer thought of being part of the people spared: urban, educated, knowing revolvers and rifles that the representations of the westerns of his childhood. Until the revelation of a family secret, that of the ball murder of his paternal grandfather, in 1919, by his grandmother. From then on took on meaning for him “the disturbing interiority” of his father and, more broadly, of the extended circle of the victims, those “whose body has never been touched by the bullets but which continue to suffer from internal injuries caused By loss: a mutilated sister, a brother reached the brain, a dead father “.
To this intimate account The author adds more conventional passages based on work like those of lawyers Adam Winkler (Gunfight, 2011, not translated) and Michael Waldman (The Second Amendment. A Biography, 2014, not translated), To put into perspective the exceptionality of the report to the weapons of the United States, since the time of the allegedly wild West. If nothing new appears in these pages, they accurately underline the paradoxes of the late 1960s, in a context of concern of the middle and popular white classes before the movement of civil rights and the racial riots. It is partly because the Black Panther Party then claimed the right to self -defense by firearm that the lobbyists of the National Rifle Association and the White Nationalists took over this argument. A series of decisions from the Supreme Court has since only consolidated this maximalist reading of the second amendment to the Constitution. The right to carry weapons has in fact become, very often, a permit to kill.
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