The man accused of being the New York subway shooter, Frank James, was captured walking through the streets of Manhattan, this Wednesday (13). The terror faced by passengers in Brooklyn took place in the largest American city, but it is part of a national phenomenon that isolates the United States from other countries: the massacre with firearms.
Frank James fired 33 shots and failed to kill, but he left signs that his intention was to produce a greater number of victims. The pistol used in the attack jammed and he had more ammunition, in addition to explosives, in a bag later found at the station. The man was raised in the New York borough of the Bronx but led a wandering life through various states, where he was arrested 12 times for various crimes.
The FBI defines armed massacre as the murder of four or more people. There were 390 such cases in the country in 2021. The rise in crime in cities, which began in the first months of the pandemic, in 2020, and continues to worsen, was accompanied by a rush to buy firearms.
In the first year of the health crisis alone, 5.4 million Americans bought a gun for the first time. It is estimated that nearly 20 million of them were sold in the US in 2021. Purchase and possession legislation is a state mandate, which explains the fact that the vast majority of armed crimes committed in New York involve items smuggled from states with lesser laws. restrictive.
Frank James bought his Glock pistol at a pawn shop in Ohio. An examination of videos he posted on a YouTube channel reveals racial hatred, misogyny and murder fantasies in incoherent speech. He even suggested suffering from mental illness on one of the recordings.
New York dawned scared this Wednesday (13). Dozens of reports made on the streets and in stations confirm that passengers’ fear of traveling by subway is the highest in decades.
The transport system in the city has a history of association with danger and urban dilapidation. It’s a reputation built up over 116 years, which spanned the city’s near-bankruptcy in the violent 1970s and reached new heights of anxiety after 9/11.
Since 2001, three terrorist plots to kill passengers have been uncovered, and in one of them, the lone attacker detonated a homemade suicide bomb, was wounded, but did not kill anyone.
Even in the pre-pandemic years, when New York became the safest metropolis in the country, the expectation of being spared from gunfire was not synonymous with escaping risks.
During this period, I was kicked in the face by a hip-hop performer dancing inside the train. Several times she changed cars, alerted by the behavior of passengers with clear signs of disturbance — sometimes, people on the streets seeking the heat of the seasons in the winter months. Another New York type of crime, the practice of pushing passengers on the tracks as the train approaches, has had at least 56 incidents in the past two years.
In August 2019, I spent 10 minutes trapped on a train that had stopped between stations near a man who had a six-foot live snake around his neck and kept an iguana loose on the floor of the car. I recorded the scene on my cell phone, looked for a police officer and he replied that there was nothing abnormal that required action.
Normal on the New York subway requires cool blood.
