AMERICA'S AMBIGUOUS ATTITUDE TO FIREARMS
Publié le 07/02/2012
Extrait du document
President Gerald Ford, who as a Congressman strenuously opposed gun control laws, bas come close to pistol-point assassination twice within 17 days. Both the guns that could have killed him are short-range weapons easily available to the average American-which must also mean to the deranged, the paranoid and. the anarchist. This is also true of the guns which assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King in 1968, and which paralysed Alabama's Govemor George Wallace for life in 1972. lt applies equally to the weapons which killed 25,000 Americans in the United States last year a statistic which, in round figures, is composed of 12,000 murders, 10,000 suicides and 3,000 fatal shooting accidmts ...
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obtaining food and for defence against hostile lndians and
marauding animais.
Even today in rural sections of the
Middle-West, South and
Far West( ...
) almost every household
is likely to have a rifle or shotgun hanging
by the kitchen door ...
This tradition
of the right to defend one's home, by violence if
necessary, still prevails across the land ...
Today, the population
of America is predominantly urban.
lt is
made up
of endless permutations of ethnie origins, social back
grounds and political creeds.
lt is the most industrialised of
the world's societies, with enormous tensions.
Crime is ram
pant, and one is ever conscious of it.
Gun-carrying police ride
the New
York City subway trains to protect the public and
every American air passenger must undergo a weapons search.
Entering a bank to cash a cheque, one is uncomfortably aware
of the security guard with a gun strapped to his hip.
Violence
is constantly reftected on television, in newspapers and films.
It is impossible to live in urban America without these things
atfecting one's psyche somehow.
JOYCE EGGINTON, Statement with a gun,
The Observer, 28 Sept.
1975.
1.
Commentaire dirigé
1) Why was it considered necessary to have a gun in a frontier
society?
2) Statistics reveal that 84 per cent
of the Americans are in
favour
of strong weapon controls.
But a growing number of
them possess firearms.
Try to explain this contradiction.
3)
How can a society protect itself against violence?
4)
The growing number of crimes bothin Europe and America
has persuaded many people
that death-penalty should be
retained
or restored.
Do you agree with them? Justify your
point of view.
2.
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