Location and form of power/aide

The notion I’m going to deal with is Location and form of power. To
begin with, I’d like to give a definition of the notion. Location can be a
place or a country. It may be also important buildings or institutions that
represent a certain form of power. Power is the ability to control or to make
things happen. In order to live together members of a community, in a location
accept rules and laws. This is to create social cohesion but it can also lead
to conflicts and tensions. We can evoke the power of a president on his nation,
the power of the media or the power of the economic system. To illustrate the notion, I have chosen to talk about the judiciary
power in the United States of America. So we can wonder, to what extent we can say that Americans have the
power of life or death on their fellow citizens? Firstly, we are going to focus
on the right of carry guns and secondly we will show that Americans have the
right to kill people legally by using the death penalty.

To begin with, Americans can carry guns and protect themselves. It all
started when the Pilgrim Fathers left England because of the religion
persecution and arrived in America. They met the Natives and slaughtered the
Indians down. Then, in 1776, they had to fight against the British for their
independence and wrote the second amendment which allowed them to use guns. So,
to carry guns became a constitutional right. Nowadays, there is also an arm
lobbying which incites people to buy guns. It’s a big business in the US and
more guns are being manufactured than ever before. Moreover, for many Americans, guns
represent the heart of their nation’s foundation and identity, a symbol of
their freedom. With such widespread gun ownership in America, it can
seem more logical to have a gun yourself. If you grow up in a culture where gun
ownership is normal, imposing any kind of regulation is difficult. So Americans
are attached to guns. There are also organizations which support guns like the National Rifle
Association. We have seen in class, a video by the NRA about it leader,
Charlton Heston. He was an actor and an American political activist. He was the
president of the NRA from 1998 to 2003. During all his life, he defended
freedom and the second amendment. He finished also his speeches by saying “If
you want to take my gun, you’ll have to take it from my cold dead hand”.

Yet this right is controversial. There has been much
debates about limiting or not the right to carry guns over the last decades. Indeed,
there are a lot of people murdered because of the guns in the US. We saw in
class, with a Brady campaign’s poster that in the US, guns have murdered almost
10 000 people. However, only 17 people were killed with guns in Finland and 60
in Spain, where people are not allowed to carry guns. Brady’s campaign wants to
prevent the gun violence, to show that sensible gun laws save lives. Moreover,
you can buy a gun too easily. We saw in class in an article from the New York
Times that in 2012, a gunman killed 12 people and wounded 59 in a Colorado
cinema during the premiere of the Batman movie "The Dark Knight Rises”. He
armed himself with an assault rifle, a shotgun and a pistol and all the weapons
were bought legally. The shooting has once again reignited the debate on gun
control in America. This shooting brings back memories of the 1999 Columbine
High School’s murders, just 25km from the cinema, in which 13 people lost their
lives. Tragedies like this
are becoming all too common but do little to get tighter gun controls reinforced.

Secondly, we can say
that the Americans have the power of life or death on their citizens because
they can legally kill people by using the death penalty. The capital punishment is a legal sentence in the USA in 32 states. But
its application is limited by the eighth amendment and to certain cases, to
certain states. The electric chair is used only in Nebraska because nowadays in
the other states, they use lethal injection. We can take the example of Pennsylvania. Death penalty is only applied
to aggravating murders like killing a police officer on duty, killing someone
while perpetrating another felony or if the offenders torture and murder their
victims. Nevertheless, in Texas there are more people on death row and there
are more executions than anywhere else. It’s a sort of tradition, their history
relates a sort of the “Wild West” where gun ownership is common. 

But we have to remember that today, the number of executions in the USA
is decreasing a lot. There was around one hundred execution in 1998 whereas
twenty in 2016. We saw in class in a poll by Lake Research Partners
that a clear majority of citizens would choose a punishment other than the
death penalty. Furthermore, the death penalty is controversial because it’s an infringement
of the human rights and a waste of lifetime. Besides, people say that even
after committing a crime, people can change and they do deserve another chance.
We saw in class an extract of The Green Mile produced by Frank Darabont which
denounces the fact that innocent people can be victims of the death penalty. It
shows how some of them may have been wrongly accused. For example, the
character of John Coffey was found guilty of raping and murdering two young
sisters.

To conclude, we could advocate that there should be stricter laws and
regulation such as to make people go through a psychological exam and to make
it mandatory to get a permit. In addition, the death penalty is controversial.
Hence, the Americans have the power of life or death on their follow citizens
in some measures and it’s different in every state. About the notion, we can
add that the economical power is one of the most influent.