Time.news – America is coming out of the pandemic tunnel to slip into another no less terrible one: that of crime and armed violence. From Chicago to New York, from Texas to Virginia, from Ohio to Georgia, there is general alarm. More than 180 people killed and 516 injured in 540 shootings that took place over the weekend of July 4th, Independence Day.
In Chicago 95 people, including a 6-year-old girl and her mother, were injured in what has become the sad American routine: shootings in the middle of the street, including gang wars, settling of scores, Russian roulette of shots fired. from racing cars. The violent scenario of Detroit in the movie “Brick Mansions” multiplied by ten, twenty, fifty. In some American cities, those injured by firearms are exceeding those infected by Covid.
No age group is immune. Norfolk police arrested a 15-year-old boy for shooting four children. In Ohio, a 17-year-old student was killed in a shooting at a summer party. In Toledo, a man started shooting in the air, displacing three hundred people. Eight injured in Fort Worth, Texas over a showdown near a car wash.
In New York 25 injured and one death in twenty-six shootings in just two days. The media are beginning to no longer consider it a normal day of American madness. The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, has decreed a ‘state of emergency’ and promised the timely hiring of twenty thousand people to patrol the streets, subways and parks.
The Big Apple, America’s liberal temple, is heading for an unprecedented centrist electoral campaign in which it will choose the new mayor between two ‘sheriffs’: moderate Democrat Eric Adams, 60, a former policeman, and Republican Curtis Sliwa, 67, founder of the “Guardian Angels”, the red beret volunteers who have presided over the city for forty years.
“It will be a very simple election campaign – Sliwa told Agi – we will talk about crime, crime, crime”. Compared to the first six months of 2020, shootings in New York City increased by 38% this year and they do not only concern the classic suburbs of hard boiled cinema, Queens and Bronx, but areas that were until recently unsuspected such as Times Square, Upper West Side, Soho. Dramatic change that has pushed even the New York liberals, just a year after the slogans of the ‘defund the police’, take away the funds from the police, to move to the center and choose Adams as a candidate, one who wants to strengthen the departments and put more agents On the road.
Clear signal: crime is everyone’s problem. The radical wing disagrees: she had put the cards on Maya Wiley, who wanted to weaken the police, but only came in third. Kathryn Garcia, backed by the party’s left, came in second. To widen the distances, the appeal of President Joe Biden who, two weeks ago, in the face of the resurgence of data, asked for more police, not less. The next four months of electoral campaign in New York will be the litmus test of the debate at the national level, in a country in which 8100 people were killed in the first five months of 2021, about 54 deaths a day, more than one every half. Now.
The Washington district has the highest violence rate in the country, followed by Louisiana, Georgia, Colorado, but New York State has returned to climb positions, bringing to mind the lead years of the ’70s. The spread of weapons remains the highest in the world, but it is not the explanation for everything, even if the numbers are unsettling: there are on average 120 weapons for every 100 people, 30% of Americans own at least one, 29% of the total of the owners has at least five. But the race to arm ourselves is nothing new and does not make it safer. It is the widespread sense of fragility that is the real novelty of post-pandemic America, and for which there does not seem to be a vaccine yet in sight.
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