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

forcefulness in America Beginning with the urban drug wars and the Rodney King riot all the way up the big lynchings in Texas and Wyoming, and now the mass murder/terrorist strike by teenagedrs in their own gritty 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 of nature enforce ment assaults on separatists, which led to the terrorist bombing at okey City the bingle worst terrorist act in American history. Since then, law enforcement agencies impart frustrate twenty-four major domestic terrorist attacks. Shootings and bombings at spontaneous abortion clinics, the slaying of abortion providers by decent-wing fanatics and racial disturbances, some of which involved flagrant natural law brutality, added to the mix. Meanwhile, mass murders and serial killings grew to such a degree they became a resolve of popular culture, inspiring everything from an Oscarwinning motion pictu re to trading cards. Violence is our mothers milk. It has given us an incredible breadth of freedom and personal liberty. plainly it is also our demon rum that threatens the fabric of that freedom and liberty. The epidemic of teenage killings in our cities, black church burnings and abortion clininc violence, Neo-nazi skinheads and white Separatists, home-grown terrorism, and the burn down of hate offensive activitys confuse brought face-to-face with an aspect of our culture most generations have found too unpleasant to contemplate. Not 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 conjunction with events such as Oklahoma City, Ruby Ridge, Idaho, the shoot-out in Waco, Texas, the Rodney King beating 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 the Indianapolis prosecutor who concluded, Violence is worthy a way of life. Still, kids-as-shooters brings a re-newed strain of violence to the tumultuous American embellish. 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 always 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 young, alienated blacks and young to middle-aged white men commit a sizable chunk of it (and in doing so wait the historical thread of violent solutions) is an inevitable result of our history. Our tradition of humiliated individualism, the cult of honor, especially but not exclusively in the South, the ferine frontier, and race and ethnicity are its cen tral features. Violence has become part of our character, big(p) at time to subvert it. The reasons for the militia movements, the vehement insistence upon the right to own guns and those chalky outlines lie squarely in a then(prenominal) that has turned violent self-assertion into a determinant of social military position 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 relieve oneself a national heritage of continual bloodshed.