Gun issue and alcohol prohibition

Résumé du document

This document contains two fully written scritps to be used for the final exam in English (Baccalauréat).

You will find here the notion "Places and forms of Power" with a talk about gun issues. The second notion you'll find is "Idea of Progress" where we are talking about alcohol prohibition in the US.

Extraits

[...] One is to simply remind shocking facts: 336 mass shootings happened in 2014. Another document reveals that gun violence costs 229 billion dollars and kills 33,000 a year. If statistics are boring, let's remember the horror of Columbine 1999, when two asocial and jealous teen boys, who we can see in color on a poster entitled "The Monsters Next Door", killed 12 of their peers plus a teacher, who are shown in black and white. Likewise primary school pupils were killed in Newton, Connecticut, in 2012. [...]

[...] This is why we are first going to consider the point of view of gun advocates, before we take the reality into account. First of all, the gun issue in America started with the Constitution. In the 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights, the Founding Fathers wanted to guarantee freedom from tyranny after the war of independence. They thought a "well-regulated militia" was necessary, and that included the right for citizens to "possess and bear arms". However, it was interpreted over time as giving total freedom, which should be sacred. [...]

[...] It is a form of popular education. So to sum up, we can say the NRA has a lot of money, which opens the doors of Congress, and credulous supporters on its side, whereas those who want weapons to be banned, or at least controlled, can count on the solidarity of victims as well as public speakers such as artists and politicians like Barack Obama. But will that be enough to stop violence? During this time, people will continue to die . [...]

[...] As well, neighbor countries like Canada and Me-xico did not ban alcohol so some people could benefit from the situation and buy alcohol there. To conclude, the Prohibition was the solution to heal a sick society but it had bad consequences and it surely did not work, so we can say that it was not an idea of progress. I think the government should not regulate people's lives with the January Dry Challange, which consists in people stopping drinking alochol for a month. [...]

[...] First we will see the origins of the Prohibition, then we will analyze its consequences. To start with, we saw a video documentary which deals with how far the alcohol consumption and the American society are related. We learned the Founding Fathers had a strong relation with spirits, for instance Jefferson loved French wine. Physcians also used to recommend it to their patients, even workers had a break to drink alochol So spirits were staple cultural elements for all American citizens. [...]