U.S. and Other Democratic Societies

U.S. and other democratic societies

Kendra Koelsch

Soc2551: Social Problems

Instructor: Milliken-Setser, Robyn

March 21, 2015

For this week’s assignment I have decided to pull most of my answers solely from my personal opinion. The questions being asked are more directed to opinion and finding resources to support my opinion to full extent would be extremely hard to do, however I will attempt to pull ideas from articles that have been written in the months previous to know.

        The first question of this four part question is asking if there is a way for us to balance the desire to control deviance and protect individual’s freedoms from the government. My answer to this is no. There is nothing that can be done within our society to balance every single person’s opinion on how situations should be handled. Many people believe in the death penalty when someone commits a First Degree murder while many people do not believe in the death penalty at all and will go to all lengths to protect those who are sentenced to death. This is just one small example of issues that we as a society and our government face every day. Our constitution allows us as citizens of the United States to hold rights that were granted to us, agreed upon by the government, signed into law, and held at a standard that cannot be broken. However, one of the most discussed articles in our constitution is the Right to Bear Arms. The NRA fights extremely hard to keep this as a legal right for all U.S. Citizens but when a school shooting, or a rampage at a mall, or a mass murder at a place of worship occurs, then everyone who opposes guns come out and say that our government needs to take guns away, or make all firearms illegal. Unfortunately, in this day and age when everyone is entitled to their own opinion, there is no possible way to make everyone happy.

        The second part of this week’s assignment is a two part question. The first part is asking if our country/government has been doing a good job maintaining balance and the second part asks if our country is going to be living in a society with repressive authority because of higher crime rates. Again for this question my answer to part one is no. Our government agencies or authority figures have not only been doing a horrible job at maintaining a balance they have allowed it in many ways to get way out of control. There is no standard set for each individual situation. A good example of this is one that has been all over the news for the past year; Police officers being involved in the shooting death of an unarmed black man. We have been smothered by these stories for almost 2 years, but amazingly we never hear about the shooting death of an 18 year old white male, unarmed. Who shot him? An African-American police office. To me, it seems more and more that if it looks like a hate crime, smells like a hate crime than the media and communities involved in the act, makes it a hate crime. Police do their job as best as they can, and unfortunately they have to kill people who are a visible and immediate threat to their own lives. The only way to keeping this from happening is by completely taking all power away from the government and authorities; but that will make our country completely and utterly out of control.