WASHINGTON: The world voiced revulsion on Wednesday (May 25) at the massacre of Texas schoolchildren, which for some raised new questions on whether the United States can effectively promote itself as a global model.
President Joe Biden, who has made championing democracy a key priority, appeared conscious of the damage to the US reputation in an impassioned plea for action late Tuesday moments after returning from Asia.
"What struck me on that 17-hour flight, what struck me, was these kinds of mass shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world," said Biden, who had mourned victims of another mass shooting in Buffalo on the eve of his trip.
Some allies questioned, politely, why the United States - with its constitutional right to bear arms and powerful gun lobby - cannot tackle gun violence, which claims on average 111 lives a day.
"DYSFUNCTIONAL" DEMOCRACY
The United States has long faced accusations of double standards in boasting of its democracy.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union pointed to Jim Crow systemic racism and, more recently, allies have voiced revulsion that the United States is the last Western nation to practice capital punishment.
Jeremi Suri, a professor of history and public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, said it was commonplace for authoritarians to say they keep citizens safe, pointing to arguments presented by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But he said the level of gun violence made it increasingly difficult to dismiss the issue as just "one of the oddities of American society, that we're cowboys and carry guns."
"The inability to manage basic safety for citizens contributes to an image that we are, unfortunately, seeing more and more evidence of, of people in foreign societies who believe that democracy is a dysfunctional form of government," he said.
"Even though we've always fallen short at home, democracy nonetheless is an important part of our international brand, and this definitely diminishes that."
Gerard Araud, the outspoken former French ambassador to the United States, on Twitter described gun violence as a "craziness without any prospect of improvement."
"Nothing. Nothing will happen. There will be more massacres," he wrote.