A gun culture

Introduction

This document is an extract from the books « The origins of National Gun Culture”, published in 2002, written by Michael Bellesilles and entitled “A gun culture”.
It is composed of a text and 2 magazines cover which picture a massacre.
Through this extract, the author enlarge on the gun culture and it’s problem in the US.
In a first part, I’m going to describe the tragedy and then in a second part, I’m going to explain the problems of violence in the US.

I – The tragedy

The 2 boys picture on the 2 magazine covers are the same person, Andrew Golden, but at different ages. The 2 magazines deal with a school shooting in Arkansas which Andrew and Mitchell Johnson took part in.

During the massacre, Andrew and Mitchell had 3 rifles and 7 pistols. They killed 4 childrens and a teacher and they injured 10 other people.

Line 20, the author wonders, I quote the text : “How did we get here ?”. It means that he is wondering how the American reached this point of school shootings. These shootings are frequent in the USA because he wrote : “th questions asked repeatedly” (l.18), “after similar mass shooting – seem depressingly familiar” (l.20).
All the questions from l.20 to 25 (“...”) show the writer’s anger/indignation and also his desire to understand and analyse the situation in order to find answers and to solve the problem.

II – Violence in the USA

The author compares the level of violence in the Us to “civil wars or social chaos” (l.31). Violence in the US is more important than elsewhere because “in a typical week, more Americans are killed with guns than in all of Western Europe in a year” (l.38-39). Nowaday, the US need to installs metal detector in the schools to avoid the pupils bearing guns. The absurdity is totally reached when 400 people bought weapons in a “back-to-school” special sale in Denver.

According to the journalist, many Americans have a love affair with guns because he speak about “the sincere