The way of blood

It is tragically ironic: yesterday, the young influencer GAMA Charlie Kirk, touring university campuses, in his early thirties, was assassinated while trying to answer a question about the number of gun victims in the United States, during an outdoor conference at Utah Valley University. I saw the blood gush from his carotid artery, and I thought of his wife and his two young children. On the Democratic side, Melissa Hortman, former Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, and her husband Mark, were murdered. They leave behind two grown children. In the United States, the firearm mortality rate is far higher than in other industrialized countries, including thousands of suicides and homicides every year. This is partly due to the fact that the number of guns in circulation exceeds the number of inhabitants, with 48% of American households owning at least one firearm in 2024. American culture, the Second Amendment, and the influence of lobbies such as the NRA all contribute to this situation, despite the regular occurrence of deadly shootings in schools and in public places. In my childhood in Canada, I witnessed the murders of President Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King. Time goes by, but I cannot get used to it, as a Québécois, as a Canadian, to such violence. Today I wept when I saw Charlie Kirk playing in the sand with his two babies, while the soundtrack sang: O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties, Above the fruited plain! America! America! I weep, I weep for my neighbors to the south, led by a criminal around whom people kill each other. I do not think I will ever adapt to this climate of hatred that prevails among people I esteem, who do not understand that violence is not a solution to political differences between human beings. Poor friends to the south, so badly and unjustly treated for the profit of the gun lobbies. God shed His grace on thee.