The actor hopes that the school massacre in his hometown will lead to new gun control measures
Uvalde already has a face, a slogan and a symbol to raise the political and social struggle in favor of greater gun control. “Make their lives matter,” implored actor Matthew McConaughey in the White House briefing room.
There was pain and anger in his voice. They were the emotions conveyed to him by the parents of the 19 children murdered at Robb Primary School, whom he and his wife Camila have visited for a week straight. The small town of 16,000, an hour from the Mexican border, is also where McConaughey was born into a humble family. His mother taught the children in the nursery located a short distance from the massacre.
In the audience, dressed in mourning and with teary eyes, his wife held a pair of green trainers with a heart on the tip of her right foot, which 10-year-old Maite Rodriguez had painted on herself. She wanted Converse so much that ever since her parents gave them to her, she wore them every day. The color green represented her love for nature, her dream of studying biology at the University of Corpus Christi and living by the sea. Her passion for the environment, the color of hope, but also something more macabre: the destructive power of semi-automatic assault rifles, like the one Salvador Ramos wielded that day to gun down his victims.
“Those green Converse on her feet turned out to be the only clear evidence to identify her,” the actor explained, holding back his anger. “What do you think of that?”
Those innocent bodies full of dreams that were beginning to live were “so mutilated that only DNA tests and green Converse were able to identify them,” he explained, “due to the exceptionally wide exit hole left by an AR-15.”
The town’s embalmers, who are still repairing bodies for wakes, told him they had never had a job as challenging as this. “Many children were not only dead, but also hollow.”
As soon as he learned of the massacre, which took place in his town, the actor loaded his wife and three children into the car and drove three hours from Austin to offer his consolation to the victims. Many of those parents were grateful to be able to tell him the stories of their children, as if that way they kept them alive. McConaughey has taken them to Washington, with photos, letters and sneakers, to touch the hearts of politicians who these days are discussing some measures of legislative control that prevent other massacres. “Make their lives matter,” he repeated over and over, photo in hand.
lives cut short
In some cases he himself was fulfilling the dreams of those truncated lives. Like that of Alithia, 10 years old, who dreamed of going to an art school in Paris and “showing her art to the world.” In the self-portrait that McConaughey showed, the girl had a little friend above her head who looked at her from the sky while she painted herself on that same threshold. “You know, we never really talked about heaven with her, but it seems like she knew somehow,” her parents told him.
The actor, who claims to have entered a Hollywood blacklist for having thanked God when receiving an award, trusts that “this time it will be different”, and not because those souls help from heaven, but because “it seems There is a sense that there is a viable way forward.
That path that would make the US “a safer country” would have to be found in Congress, where he went after briefly meeting with Joe Biden in the White House. According to him, the parties are willing “at least” to sit down together to have a real conversation. As a “responsible” gun owner raised in rural Texas, the actor embodies bipartisan unity around the need to raise the legal age to 21 to purchase semi-automatic rifles, establish a waiting time to complete the purchase, generalize the verification of criminal and psychiatric records, strengthen the security of schools and invest in mental health, he mentioned.
“These regulations would not be a step backwards, but a step forward for civil society and even for the second constitutional amendment” that protects the right to bear arms. The Republican opposition responds that they would not solve the problem. “Look, would it cure everything? No, hell no! But people are suffering and, despite how divided our country is, the issue of the responsibility of wives is one in which we agree more than what they make us believe, “he assured.
The ‘soft’ fall
The violent shootings that make headlines around the world from schools, supermarkets or a church parking lot are just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, they only represent 1%, according to a study by the PEW Research Center. 43% are common crimes, which have society even more jaded.
Of those, the Republican opposition blames Democratic-appointed judges and prosecutors. One of the most progressive, Chesa Boudin, fell on Tuesday in a referendum organized to disqualify him. The so-called “recall” processes, which exist in California, leave the bitter taste of being able to unseat a politician for fewer votes than he obtained when he was re-elected. In the case of the San Francisco district attorney, whose parents were in jail for crimes related to the Weather Underground armed gang, 60% of the 123,000 votes cast in the city were for him to resign.
The campaign managed to paint him as “soft” on criminals and associate him with a series of high-profile crimes and robberies. Boudin considers that he has been a scapegoat for the Republicans to test an electoral strategy at the national level, with which they intend to attack the Democrats. The White House takes note of it.
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