A tree, a sofa, a smiling family and garlands, in short, a normal Christmas photo. With this detail, they all pose with an assault rifle and that it is an elected Republican.
In the United States, an elected representative of the Republican Party was at the center of a controversy on Sunday caused by a photo showing him with his family, all smiles in front of a Christmas tree adorned with garlands … and guns in hand, a few days after another deadly shooting at an American school.
” Merry Christmas ! PS: Father Christmas, bring ammunition ”, commented Thomas Massie, representative of Kentucky in the lower house of the United States Congress, by tweeting the image, where he appears in the company of six of his relatives.
While on Tuesday, the United States was bereaved by a shooting in a high school in Michigan (north) in which a teenager killed four students, a tragedy that has become recurrent in a country where gun violence has been described as a ‘”Epidemic” by President Biden. The parents of the 15-year-old shooter, charged with manslaughter, had given their son the Sig Sauer semi-automatic pistol as an early Christmas present.
Caused an uproar
In this context, the family photo of Thomas Massie caused an uproar, elected officials or parents of shooting victims accusing the Republican of insensitivity. “Outrageous,” Democrat John Yarmuth wrote, saying such messages amounted to “blatantly taking child murder in the face.”
Republican Adam Kinzinger, saying he is in favor of the right to carry a weapon, tweeted that it was “not a support for the right to hold and carry a weapon” but “a fetishism”.
Activist Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter was killed in the 2018 Parkland High School shooting, one of the worst school massacres in the United States, posted his own “family photos.” “One is the last photo I took of Jaime, the other shows where she is buried. “
Manuel Oliver, father of another Parkland victim, told CNN that such an image was “a big part of the problem”, and “should teach us who we should elect, and who not.”
–
