My Neighbor Has Guns Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

My Neighbor Has Guns - Essay Example Based on these statistics, there has been an intention of reducing violence by restricting guns. However, the issue generates immense controversy in the country. For example, some opines that there should be control on guns as they lead to increased rate of violence. On the other hand, others believe that the increased rate of violence calls for increased gun ownership in the society as it will help give protection. In United States, most of the private citizens own handguns. For example, statistics shows that, in 1990, there were over 200 million guns in private hands of which a third were handguns (Kleck 1). Various reasons resulted to increased gun ownership in the 1960s to 80s. First, there was increased gun ownership in the country was the formation of new households and growing wealth enabling gun owners to get more guns (Kleck 1). Second, there was increased rate of crime among people who previously had no title for guns. Ownership of guns in the neighborhood and homes should be regulated as it leads to unintended accident, intimidation, increased rate of violence, and abuse by weak in society. Guns promote weaker adversaries to attack stronger ones (Kleck 1). Therefore, there should be tight restriction on gun ownership and operation. This occurs as the weak and vulnerable finds it easier to commit a crime that would have been dangerous difficult to carry out, or physically or emotionally difficult (Kleck 1). In fact, guns make the individuals involved having impression that they wield considerable influence that cannot be matched by anyone else. The attacker feels having greater power as compared to the victim. Moreover, gun might make it possible for the aggressor to feel that the planned attack will be advantageous to the points that the victim would not be able to counteract its effect (Kleck 1). Furthermore, the aggressor may have a feel that the victims accumulate enough fear that would make it impossible for them to strike back even if they have physically capability (Kleck 1). Therefore, this relates to the statistics that show that women attack men mainly by use guns (Kleck 1). Moreover, there is more likely that an individual will attack a group rather than a group attacking an individual. Likewise, the immense courage to attack is gained from the fact that one attack from a distance. Moreover, guns lead to unintentional accidents in both homes and neighborhood. Some of the accidents may lead to death or injury of an individual with disastrous consequences. For example, a gun may go off and shoot a family member, and this may lead to guilt and emotional breakdown. A survey carried out from 3003 to 2007 showed that over 500 Americans were killed per year unintentionally with firearms (Hemenway 2). In fact, more of the deaths occurred in homes. Moreover, most of the victims were below 25 years and family or friends accidentally shot the victims (Miller, Hemenway and Barber 1). Consequently, most of the accidental shootings deaths in the homes are due to guns kept in the home. There appears that accidental gun deaths are more vulnerable in areas with more guns (Miller, Hemenway and Barber 1). The result correlates with the statistics that show that accidental firearms deaths are high in states with a high level of guns ownership (Hemenway 2). Moreover, increased access to guns by children leads to

UK Gelatin :: essays research papers

UK Gelatin   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE, is a degenerative disease affecting the central nervous system of cattle causing the brain to appear as a sponge. The cattle then begin acting abnormally and eventually have to be killed. BSE can be transmitted to humans if they consume raw meat from an infected cow or if one consumes the eyeballs, spinal tissue, or the brain. This disease is known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Another disease similar to BSE, which is found in sheep, is Scrapie. Scrapie has been around for nearly two hundred years. It is presumed that the Scrapie agent jumped species and moved into cattle when sheep offal, leftover parts of butchered animals, were ground up and used as a protein supplement in cattle feed and the subsequently fed to cattle. Gelatin is considered safe for human consumption since its preparation involves a chemical process that destroys BSE infectivity. BSE-infectiousness is also destroyed during cooking and baking. Gelatin is manufactured primarily from the hides of pigs and the bones of cattle. During processing, these source materials are exposed to extremely harsh conditions, including prolonged exposure to highly acid or alkaline solutions. Gelatin is used in a wide variety of consumer and medical products regulated by the FDA. These products range from candies and desserts to vaccines, drugs, medical devices, dietary supplements and cosmetics.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In the unlikely event of any initial contamination of raw material, the gelatin manufacturing process would reduce BSE activity. The steps are as follows one hundred times by degreasing, ten times by acid demineralization, one hundred times by alkaline purification, one hundred times by washing, filtration, and ion exchange, and one hundred times by sterilization. Therefore, the combined effect of the processing stages gives a person a one in one billion chance of contracting BSE. The gelatin production process is efficient enough to remove and or inactivate minimal remaining infectivity. As a safety precaution, the use of UK bovine raw material for the manufacture of gelatin for food, animal feed, pharmaceutical, medical and cosmetic uses is not permitted under certain UK and EU legislation. All UK produced bone gelatin intended for these uses is made from non-UK raw materials. The UK manufacturing sites have to be registered with the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Foods (MAFF) and regular inspections confirm that strict controls are met. These controls include full trace ability of raw materials. Consequently, UK produced bone gelatin can be considered to be the best controlled and monitored of any gelatin produced in the world, providing maximum reassurance to consumers.

Union Carbide Disaster: Bhopal, India

Union Carbide Disaster: Bhopal, India On December 3, 1984 just three miles from the City of Bhopal.. An American owned Union Carbide Pesticide Plant leaked Toxic gas in to the air killing over Hundreds of people right away. Mr. Y P Gokhale, managing director of Union Carbide in India said, â€Å"That a Methyl isocyanate gas (MIC) had escaped when a valve in the plant’s underground storage tank broke under pressure. The leak was caused by a series of mechanical and human errors in the pesticide producing plant.For a full hour the plant’s personnel and safety equipment failed to detect the massive leak, and when the alarm was sound most of the harm was already done. What was worse was that local health officials had not been educated on the toxicity of the chemicals used at the Union Carbide plant therefore there were no emergency procedures in place to protect the people of Bhopal. Panic broke out in the city of Bhopal and the areas surrounding more then tens of thousan ds of people attempted to escape. More then 20,000 people required hospital symptoms including swollen eyes, frothing at the mouth and breathing difficulties.There we thousands of dead animals just covering the streets of Bhopal. The Indian government sued Union Carbide in a civil case and settled in 1989 for 470 million dollars. The Union Carbide which shut down its Bhopal plant after the disaster has yet to clean up the site completely. More then thousands of people died instantly and over 2,000 people died during the aftermath. In 1999 a voluntary group in Bhopal which believed not enough had been done to help the victims, filed a lawsuite in the United States claiming that Union Carbide violated international law and human rights.In November of 2000 Warren Anderson was charged of â€Å"Culpable homicide† for cost cutting at the plant which is alleged to have compromised safety Standards. In 2004 the Indian Supreme Court approved a compensation plan drawn up to help more t he 570,000 Victims of the disaster. The welfare commission paid well over 350 million dollars. The Bhopal disaster in 1984 was one of the worst industrial accidents in history. However after 3 decades later toxic waste is still being stored on the site under poor conditions.Today the people in Bhopal still live with the consequences of the gas cloud and are still fighting for compensation. Almost 28 years after the accident, a group of cabinet ministers in New Delhi decided to sign over the disposal of the toxic waste from Bhopal to the German technicians. The old factory in Bhopal with its rusty tanks and dilapidated clusters of buildings, is like a ghost factory. People in the area of Bhopal are still dying from the toxic gas leak more then 300,000 have died from it over the years and more are expected to die as well.This was one of the deadliest Toxic gas leaks in the world I can’t believe that this happen. And what hurts the most is that it took them over 28 years to fina lly take care of the matter and I doubt its all just quiet yet as they are hitting the 29th year since the gas leak. Germany was nice to move in and help them out by taking this stuff and getting rid of it for them. I on the other hand think something should have been done about it many of years ago. On the 20th anniversary of the Mascara a man claim to have said that the Company Dow was going to pick up the waste and get rid of it.When the news people called to ask the man question there was no one by that name that had worked for them and that the guy was an imposter that they had no intention to pick up the waste. Work Cited 1. http://www. spiegel. de/international/world/germany-plans-to-dispose-of-bhopal-toxic-waste-a-840791. html 2. http://topics. nytimes. com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/india/bhopal/index. html 3. http://www. history. com/this-day-in-history/the-bhopal-union-carbide-disaster 4. http://news. bbc. co. uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/3/n ewsid_2698000/2698709. stm

Semantic Field Analysis Definition and Examples

The arrangement of words (or lexemes) into groups (or fields) on the basis of an element of shared meaning. Also called lexical field analysis. There is no set of agreed criteria for establishing semantic fields, say Howard Jackson and Etienne Zà © Amvela, though a common component of meaning might be one (Words, Meaning and Vocabulary, 2000). Although the terms lexical field and semantic field are usually used interchangeably, Siegfried Wyler makes this distinction: a lexical field is a structure formed by lexemes while a semantic field is the underlying meaning which finds expression in lexemes (Colour and Language: Colour Terms in English, 1992). Examples of Semantic Field Analysis A lexical field is a set of lexemes that are used to talk about a defined area of experience; Lehrer (1974), for example, has an extensive discussion of the field of cooking terms. A lexical field analysis will attempt to establish the lexemes that are available in the vocabulary for talking about the area under investigation and then propose how they differ from each other in meaning and use. Such an analysis begins to show how the vocabulary as a whole is structured, and more so when individual lexical fields are brought into relationship with each other. There is no prescribed or agreed method for determining what constitutes a lexical field; each scholar must draw their own boundaries and establish their own criteria. Much work still needs to be undertaken in researching this approach to vocabulary. Lexical field analysis is reflected in dictionaries that take a topical or thematic approach to presenting and describing words.(Howard Jackson, Lexicography: An Introduction. Routled ge, 2002) The Semantic Field of Slang An interesting use for semantic fields is in the anthropological study of slang. By studying the types of slang words used to describe different  things researchers can better understand the values held by subcultures.   Semantic Taggers A semantic tagger is a way to tag certain words into similar groups based on how the word is used. The word bank, for example, can mean a financial institution or it can refer to a river bank. The context of the sentence will change which semantic tag is used.   Conceptual Domains and Semantic Fields When analyzing a set of lexical items, [linguist Anna] Wierzbicka does not just examine semantic information . . .. She also pays attention to the syntactic patterns displayed by the linguistic items, and furthermore orders the semantic information in more encompassing scripts or frames, which may in turn be linked to more general cultural scripts which have to do with norms of behavior. She therefore offers an explicit and systematic version of the qualitative method of analysis for finding a close equivalent of conceptual domains.This type of analysis may be compared with semantic field analysis by scholars such as Kittay (1987, 1992), who proposes a distinction between lexical fields and content domains. As Kittay writes: A content domain is identifiable but not exhausted by a lexical field (1987: 225). In other words, lexical fields can provide an initial point of entry into content domains (or conceptual domains). Yet their analysis does not provide a full view of conceptual domains, and this is not what is claimed by Wierzbicka and her associates either. As is aptly pointed out by Kittay (1992), A content domain may be identified and not yet articulated [by a lexical field, GS], which is precisely what may happen by means of novel metaphor (Kittay 1992: 227). (Gerard Steen, Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage: A Methodological Analysis of Theory and Research. John Benjamins, 2007) See also: CollocationConceptual DomainHypernym  and  HyponymLexical SetLexicologyMeronymSemantic ChangeSemanticsSememeVocabulary