Violence in America Essay -- Violent Crime Civil Disorder Society Essa

wildness in America Beginning with the urban drug wars and the Rodney King riot every the way up the spectacular lynchings in Texas and Wyoming, and now the mass mangle/terrorist strike by teenagers in their own high school, the 90s is a decade made numb by civil disorder. In between came the incidents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, involving dubious law enforcement assaults on separatists, which led to the terrorist bombing at Oklahoma City the single worst terrorist act in American history. Since then, law enforcement agencies have thwarted twenty-four major domestic terrorist attacks. Shootings and bombings at stillbirth clinics, the slaying of abortion providers by right-wing fanatics and racial disturbances, virtually of which involved flagrant police brutality, added to the mix. Meanwhile, mass murders and serial killings grew to such a degree they became a part of popular culture, inspiring everything from an Oscarwinning motion picture to trading cards. Violen ce is our mothers milk. It has given us an incredible bigness of freedom and personal liberty. however it is also our demon rum that threatens the textile of that freedom and liberty. The epidemic of teenage killings in our cities, black church burnings and abortion clininc abandon, Neo-nazi skinheads and albumen Separatists, home-grown terrorism, and the rise of hate crimes have brought face-to-face with an brass of our culture most generations have found too unpleasant to contemplate. non until children began dying in the streets in unprecedented numbers and disgruntled white males begin forming paramilitary organizations did a general concern about violence begin to re-appear. When you consider our high crime rates in lodge with events such as Oklahoma City, Ruby Ridge, Idaho, the shoot-out in Waco, Texas, the Rodney King walloping and riot, the Crown Heights, NY, riot and the lynchings in Bensonhurst and Howard Beach, NY, in 1986 and 89, its difficult to disagree with t he capital of Indiana prosecutor who concluded, Violence is becoming a way of life. Still, kids-as-shooters brings a re-newed channel of violence to the tumultuous American landscape. Prior to the three-year blood-spree of school shootings, enough corpses were already littering the inner city landscape to convince us that we had waded knee-deep into a crisis of violence. In spite of declining crime r... ...violent history of any western nation. Weve ever so been that way, and we show no signs of changing. What has been changing is the nature of the violence, and whos doing it. The fact that childlike, alienated blacks and young to middle-aged white men commit a sizable musket ball of it (and in doing so continue the historical thread of violent solutions) is an unavoidable result of our history. Our tradition of rugged individualism, the cult of honor, especially but not exclusively in the South, the untamed frontier, and race and ethnicity are its central features. Violence h as become part of our character, threatening at clock time to subvert it. The reasons for the reserves movements, the vehement insistence upon the right to own guns and those chalky outlines lie squarely in a past that has turned violent self-assertion into a determinant of social status and aggression into a sign of character. not all Americans are violent, of course. In fact, most arent violent at all. And not all violent individuals or groups act that way all the time. But enough people have spilled other peoples blood enough of the time and in enough regions to create a national heritage of unvarying bloodshed.