Welcome to Violent America: Est 1776

          For my critic I choose Donkeys and Elephants. For the past few months it has been very rough to watch the news because of all of the racial tension between the police and minorities. That being said it’s no secret with what has been going on with the city of Baltimore. In Mr. Ybarra’s blog he mentions the riots that have been going in Baltimore and that its people are fed up of feeling unequal. He even links the Baltimore riots to the Los Angeles riot of 1992 were Rodney King was beaten by the police and was captured on camera. I find this link very interesting because now thinking about it a lot of people on that day of the Los Angeles riot were destroying a lot of property as well as looting many stores. I can even think of going all the back as 1773 of the Boston tea party. The people decided to disguise themselves as Indians so they could sneak into a British ship so they could throw out cargo of tea. They did this because they were tired of paying high taxes as well as being treated as second rate citizens. In a way when people want to get their point across they look towards what could get anyone’s attention and that is to cause some destruction. Mr. Ybarra continues to say that destroying where you live doesn’t resolve a thing as well as looting. With that I agree because at the end of the day the only way the city will be able to pay for the damages are through the people paying taxes. I do agree with Mr. Ybarra complaining that the news isn’t covering enough of the peaceful riots because if all you’re doing is showing the violence of the city then you make it seem that everyone is reacting the same way. Hopefully though we can wake up one day and acknowledge that we need each other and that racial discrimination can be a thing of the past.

The Wild Wild West

In my last critique I took a defense towards responsible people to open carry fire arms because it’s proven that guns don’t kill people that people kill people. But after recently reading an article on CNN, “Capitol cops left guns in bathroom stalls” I said, you have to be kidding me! What is the point for citizens to carry a fire arm if people like the police can’t seem to remember where they had placed their weapon? Are we ready to have more fire arms on the streets if people keep misplacing them?

According to the article on CNN, there were two incidents in which one involved on officers leaving their Glock pistols in bathroom stalls. The other one accrued when a member of House Speaker John Boehner’s police detail left a gun after using a toilet in the speaker's suite of offices in the Capitol. The guns was loaded and found by a young child, two congressional sources told CNN. Again, Are you kidding me! In an article on Slate.com, it says that The United States accounts for nearly 75 percent of all children murdered in the developed world. Children between the ages of 5 and 14 in the United States are 17 times more likely to be murdered by firearms than children in other industrialized nations.

           We are fortune to live in a country that allows us to have freedom, but after hearing about these recent actions it makes me hesitant if we’re ready to carry fire arms around. I would be open towards the idea in people carrying fire arms if they were safer, as in the only way the gun could fire is if the person registered towards it was holding it.