A committee of the House of Representatives criticizes the “irresponsibility” of these companies, which “choose their income over the lives of their compatriots”
The increase in violence in the United States is linked to the increase in income from the arms industry. Five companies selling “military-style assault weapons to civilians” have made more than $1 billion in the past decade, the House Oversight and Reform Committee said, amid hearings on oversight and regulation. of weapons due to the latest shootings that have devastated the country.
Uvalde, Illinois, Philadelphia… These are some of the states where an armed person attacked innocents. Many families have lost everything in these tragic events. Who is partly to blame? The Committee is clear: These types of companies deployed “manipulative marketing campaigns” that sought to connect masculinity with the purchase of rifles. In this way, they have “taken advantage” of violence. “The gun industry has flooded our neighborhoods, our schools, and even our churches and synagogues with these deadly weapons, and has gotten rich doing it,” said committee chair Carolyn B. Maloney. And it is that, in the case of some manufacturers, as reported by the newspaper ‘The Washington Post’, their income has doubled or tripled in recent years. “They are choosing their profits over the lives of their countrymen. This is beyond irresponsible,” Maloney condemned.
The CEOs of two of the gun companies who appeared before the committee on Capitol Hill defended their products, pointing out that the real problem is not the guns themselves, but the people who can use them to inflict mass carnage. “Mass shootings were almost unheard of just a few decades ago. So what has changed? Not firearms,” declared Marty Daniel, CEO of Daniel Defense, the manufacturer of the weapons that were involved, on the one hand, in the massacre at the Uvalde elementary school last May – which left nineteen children and two murdered teachers– and, on the other, a deadly attack in Las Vegas in 2017 –there were sixty fatalities–. He called these tragic events “pure evil” and “unreasonable,” among other attacks of this type that have occurred in the country, and stated that “our nation’s response must focus not on the type of weapon, but on the type of people who they will probably commit mass shootings.”
Strain
Also appearing at the hearing was Christopher Killoy, president and CEO of Ruger & Co, who recognized “the tension between our constitutional right to own firearms and the harm inflicted by criminals who acquire them,” although he assured that the latter shouldn’t prevent the former. “It is wrong to deprive citizens of their constitutional right to purchase the legal firearm they want due to the criminal acts of evil people,” he stated flatly. “A firearm can be used for good or for bad. The difference is in the intent of the individual who owns it, which we respectfully maintain should be the focus of any investigation into the root causes of criminal violence involving firearms.”
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