0 Comments
Every year, drunk driving kills roughly 10,00 people, and every year some new law is passed to keep people safe on the road. Politicians are active in imposing stricter fines and harsher punishments to drunk drivers, yet in 2008 alone, guns killed 12,000 people in America, and our government is hesitant to act. We are hesitant to protect our people from the danger of firearms, yet we have no problem imposing fines and punishments for those driving under the influence. Why? Both our huge, horrible problems in our society, and we must address them as such. To say that currently, in America, the gun laws and restrictions are adequate would be wrong. First, let’s look at murders. The FBI reported that 66.9% of killings in 2008 were done with firearms, and their 2010 ‘Crime Clock’ indicates a violent crime will occur every 25.3 seconds. If over half of murders are occurring with firearms, it’s safe to assume that the absence of these weapons would reduce the number of murders. The deaths of 26 children and adults in Newtown earlier this year should’ve been enough to spur change, yet the momentum has worn off, and public opinion is swaying again. Is it really been so easy to forget the 14 killed during the Binghamton shooting? What about the Fort Hood Massacre, where 13 died? And even more recently, the shooting in the Sikh temple? Society should not need another massacre to remind us the importance of our people. If we allow this horrible pattern to continue by ignoring guns until dozens are dead, there is no doubt a tragedy like the Aurora shooting- where 12 people died and 58 were wounded- will repeat. It’s easy to write the problem off as an issue with enforcing the law rather than the laws themselves, but acquiring a gun legally doesn’t mean the recipient won’t hurt people. In the 10 years between 1998 and 2008, and only 1% of background checks caused the requests to be denied. Out of mass shootings, a more than three-quarters of the guns used were obtained legally. If one needs an example, one needs only to look back at the Newtown tragedy. Those guns were legal. Think of Jared Loughner when he opened fire on a crowd of people there to see Rep. Gabby Giffords. The gun he used to kill six people was entirely legal. Clearly, we need to work on making it tougher for ordinary people to buy guns; it’s all too easy for them to fall into the wrong hands. There’s a common myth going around that the harsher laws and practices of states and countries with stricter gun control laws don’t actually have an effect, but this is flat-out wrong. Let’s look at Japan, for instance, where guns are incredibly difficult for citizens to obtain. In 2006, only 2 people were murdered with a firearm! To look for closer examples of stricter gun laws in America, let’s compare Louisiana , one of places with looser laws, and Massachusetts, which has the most gun restrictions of any state in the USA. Between 2007 and 2010, Louisiana had averaged 17.9 gun-related deaths for every 100,000 people, in contrast with Massachusetts’s 3.4 fatalities for every 100,000 people. Clearly, stricter policies led to safer states, so why haven’t we embraced these numbers and introduced better, more efficient restrictions? Authors often end novels with cliff-hangers if they are in the middle of a series. But when the last book in a series is ended with a cliff-hanger, it leaves the reader agitated and upset. Leaving the reader without knowledge on the character's experiences after the resolution of the story is not only annoying, but hard to cope with. Many people become obsessed with certain series' and become attatched to character's and their stories throughout the series. By the last novel in the series, we expect to have a perfect idea of how everything will be summed up. A happy ending! Everyone loves one of those! Even if it's a not-so-happy ending it still satisfies the reader, leaving them with knowledge on what has happened afterwards. When I read the last book of my favorite series, i was astonished at the ending. There were so many problems unresolved and so many mysteries untouched. This left me disapointed with what i've been waiting for for months. The reader wants to be satisfied with what the characters they have come so accustomed to. They want to be 'okay' with what happens to them. Now this author had a reason for ending it that way. She said she ended it with a mystery so the fans could write their own fan-fiction about what they think will happen to the characters. This is creative, yet hard. Not all the fans might be able to write, or let alone, have the creativity to think at all about what will happen! Authors are very creative, yet very clueless.
|
Archives
June 2013
Categories |