What can Portugal teach America?

More than 230 mass weapons attacks in the United States of America (USA) this year, as of last Friday. The data is from the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a “mass shooting” as a “shooting attack in which at least four people were shot”. It is a number that is impressive not only for its own sake, but also for the idea of ​​trivializing the attempt on life that will not suffer. It’s also a frightening number, given the influence of American culture around the world.
There are several explanations for what is happening in America today, in terms of weapons and the violence associated with it: a culture of violence installed in music and cinema (from fareste to traditional values ​​to rap), mental health problems, traditional values ​​in crisis, among other factors. But these are conditions that exist in many other countries, where the phenomenon of violence in question is not, at all, so blatant. What distinguishes the US on this issue is simply a clearly visible reality: the very easy access to weapons. something so logical in light of reality, that it seems to us a Portuguese who in America is not even childish in this regard.
The American gun (power) lobby has radicalized the argument that it is the human who carries a gun and pulls the trigger and that the gun is a safety trigger that citizens should also be entitled to. It is true that almost anything can be a weapon, for even words, as history has taught us, can be lethal in the wrong voice. But the Portuguese example seems to me to be successful in understanding this issue. Right from the start, because Portugal has had, in this matter and others, the ability to reflect the legislation on inherited costumes.
In 2018, the new gun law was an example of this. He updated the context of the weapon, refusing to trivialize it, but allowing it to have an identity, rooted in recreational, sporting, economic, collecting and self-defense practices, as long as they are regulated. It was just about security, solution guarantees and control of prevention issues. The weapon, when changing owners by inheritance, for example, not necessarily the context of the identity of the property and not the context of the inheritance of the one who bequeathed it, can’t it be formed by the one who bequeathed it, for example? It has this ability to pioneer legislation that led the first to face problems that were not victims of massacres, sometimes common, sometimes common, which were easy to face.
This capacity for reflection through legislation ends up, ironically, being increasingly urgent in the American “House of Democracy”. Especially when, on the American horizon, it is not far from the possibility of setbacks (to which Trump opened a door) in areas and fundamental issues such as, for example, abortion. America needs new pioneers. Let’s hope Biden is one of them.