Don Winslow: The United States has an unhealthy love affair with guns

The writer US Don Winslow believes that USA have a “sick idyll” with weapons and a “mass psychosis”as demonstrated by events such as shootings from the state of Maine, where a man with an assault rifle killed 18 people and injured 13 this Wednesday.

“Damn. “When is this going to end?”. I don’t have the answer, but there are things that we should be doing now, such as stopping the sale of assault rifles in its tracks, which we did before, and reinforcing the checks on gun buyers, so that there is a history.” so that people with mental imbalances cannot acquire them, says Winslow (New York, 1953) in an interview with EFE.

Winslow, author of 21 noir novels such as ““The Winter of Frankie Machine”, “Wild” (which was made into a film by Oliver Stone), “The power of the dog” either “The cartel”and who previously worked as a private investigator, expert in the fight against terrorism and judicial consultant, has just received the José Luis Sampedro award in Madrid within the framework of the Getafe Negro Festival for the quality of his literature and the social commitment of his novels.

A commitment that, he says, twenty years ago he would not have valued, since “All I was trying to do was entertain.”. But “So, things happen.” as happened when in 1998 when he woke up he read a news story in the San Diego Union Tribune about the massacre of 19 innocent people, men, women and children, in Mexico.

Was the beginning “of this 23-year odyssey”, says the author, who began researching drug cartels and meeting members of street gangs, drug addicts, police…

“Then I began to feel a kind of responsibility to portray their lives within fiction. I wanted to remain an entertainer and a storyteller, but try to give the reader a sense of who these people were, their hopes and their lives.”, he comments.

He also now learned from the press at the beginning of his day the news of the shooting in Maine: ““There is no legitimate purpose for anyone to possess an assault rifle.”

Although many Americans favor restricting the use of guns, “Politicians, and especially Republicans, are in the clutches” from organizations like the National Rifle Association (NRA), he points out.

The problem is that the weapons are already out there, says Winslow, who considers it nonsense that there are already three guns or weapons for every American.

And he assures that when he hears the right of his country say that “Guns don’t kill people because people kill people.”reply: “True, that’s true. “People kill people, with guns.”

The author has just finished the third novel of his latest police trilogy that already makes up “City on Fire” and “City of Dreams”after which, as already announced, he will retire from literature to dedicate himself, at least until November 2024, “to do what I can to stop, slow down, to donald trump”.

He also stops writing, he says, to “make room on the stage for upcoming or younger writers”after having enjoyed a career ““great”much better than I could have dreamed “or what he even deserves.”

He believes that it will make him very happy to leave public life, read more and “catch waves” -lives between California and Rhode Island-. And dedicating himself to two passions, researching, although not writing, about the very early history of Native Americans and the lives of the models of the impressionist painters.