Prática de Shadowing: Why America (Still) Loves Guns - Aprenda a falar inglês com vídeo
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T. Compared to similar countries, America is a violent place.
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In America, people die violent deaths at a much higher rate than in other rich capitalist countries.
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This violence has expressed itself in a number of ways throughout history.
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But guns are currently and have always been part of the American language of violence.
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This video is not intended to prescribe some solution for American gun violence.
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I will not advocate for gun rights or for gun control in this essay.
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Instead, this video will identify in an objective way why America seems to have a genetic,
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unending, and unstoppable fondness for firearms.
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The first thing we should determine is simple.
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Do Americans actually love guns?
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The answer here is complicated.
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According to the Pew Research Center, only 32% of Americans say they actually own a gun.
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This stat alone would indicate that perhaps Americans don't actually love guns as much as we may believe.
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But when we dig further into these statistics, we get a more comprehensive version of the truth.
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Despite a statistical ambivalence about gun ownership, Americans have more guns per capita than any other country in the world, by a large margin.
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Per 100 residents, America has about 120 guns.
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The next highest country is Yemen, with about 53.
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So within the context of the globe, yes, we can say that Americans relatively do love guns.
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The majority of Americans do believe that gun ownership is a right.
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Depending on whose statistics you look to, this support ranges from just over 50% to over 70%.
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Loving guns isn't inherently bad, but among high-income countries, America has the seventh highest rate of gun homicides.
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The countries that are ahead of America, though, are small nations with whom America probably can't be compared.
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Panama, the Bahamas, Trinidad, and Tobago, to name a few.
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Notably, two of the countries that America trails are American territories, Puerto Rico and the U.S.
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Virgin Islands.
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When we compare American homicide by gun rates with our global peers, America is an outlier.
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Among high-income countries with populations over 10 million, America is first with 4.52 gun homicides per 100,000 people.
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Saudi Arabia is a distant second.
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Canada has 0.62.
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The UK has .01.
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All of this put together can lead to a reasonable and objective conclusion.
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America leads the world by some margin in gun violence.
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But still, Americans love guns.
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So here we arrive at the core of this video.
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Why?
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Data can provide us with a contemporary but perhaps shallow answer to this question.
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Statistics show that 67% of gun owners have a gun for protection, 38% for hunting, 30% for sports shooting,
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13% as part of a gun collection, and 8% for their job.
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On an individual level, these are reasonable justifications.
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But this data doesn't really tell us how or why guns have become so ingrained in American culture.
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The French have wine, Canadians have hockey, in much the same way, Americans have guns.
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Why is this?
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, America's affinity for guns started a long, long time ago.
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When early colonists arrived in North America, they found Native Americans who were no strangers to violent conflict.
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However, these colonists brought with them a technology that would make conquering the New World fairly straightforward.
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That technology was, of course, the rifle.
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The colonists realized their rifles gave them an immense advantage over the native people, so colonial leaders mandated gun ownership.
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In 1658, Virginia required that,
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quote, Around this time, Plymouth County also instated a similar law requiring every male to own a gun.
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This law would shortly thereafter be extended to the entirety of Massachusetts.
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At the time, these weapons were primarily intended to attack and defend against Native Americans.
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In his book, The Barbarous Years, historian Bernard Bailyn notes that there was one group,
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Europeans, using violence to assert its will over another group, Native Americans.
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This basically set the precedent that violence, specifically gun violence, was a legitimate method of settling disputes and enacting one's own will in America.
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And sure enough, colonists began settling their own disputes with violence.
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Rates of European-on-European violence rose during this period.
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So perhaps it could even be an understatement to say that America was founded on violence.
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America was from its very beginning steeped in gun violence.
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Certainly conquering land is different than shooting up a school, but the point remains.
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Since Europeans arrived, America has had violence through the use of firearms.
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As America moved into the Revolutionary War, we see the evolution of America's gun culture.
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We shouldn't go so far as to say the Revolutionary War happened over the right to own guns.
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The British made some haphazard attempts at confiscating American guns, but this was not the driving force of the Revolution.
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In reality, the Revolution came from issues over taxes and representation in British government.
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But in any case, we won the Revolutionary War by using guns without firearms today there would likely be no United States of America.
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This is an important thing to remember as we discuss the country's ongoing cultural love for guns.
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Following the war, early colonists still had fresh memories of British troops and their treatment of American citizens.
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With this in mind, America and its leaders were not too keen on the idea of a standing American army.
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Quite the opposite, the idea of a national army was seen as antithetical to American liberty.
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However, the Founding Fathers did recognize that some type of military might would be necessary to keep the peace.
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So, they set out to protect the private citizens' rights to organizing militias.
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Gun ownership is pointedly discussed within America's Bill of Rights.
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The Second Amendment reads, A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,
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the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
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Both gun rights and gun control activists often claim that the Second Amendment is written in clear language.
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Both sides will proclaim that this amendment clearly supports their own argument.
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Indeed, when we examine this amendment, things can become confusing quite quickly.
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First of all, we have simple grammatical syntax.
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The English language has changed since this was written.
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Today, the sentence is difficult to parse.
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If we examine it only in form, as purely a grammatical exercise, the Second Amendment is difficult to understand.
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What do all of these commas mean?
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What exactly shouldn't be infringed?
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The militia or the guns themselves?
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To the modern reader, the Second Amendment is not written very clearly.
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After all, if it was, there certainly wouldn't be so much debate about it.
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The meanings of words have also changed in ways that can enhance arguments for either side of the issue.
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Take the word regulated.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning constitutional scholar Jack Rakove says that in the 18th century,
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regulated did not mean subjected to laws or government restrictions.
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Rather, it meant that the militia would be armed, organized, and properly effective.
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So we could take this interpretation to mean the Second Amendment does not endorse government regulation of firearms.
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But then there's the phrase bear arms.
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Saul Cornell is another leading constitutional scholar who is considered one of the foremost authorities on revolutionary era legal thinking.
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Cornell has indicated that the right to bear arms had almost nothing to do with personal self-defense in revolutionary America.
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At the time, firearms were not considered tools for self-defense, they were military objects.
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Edged weapons and blunt objects were more in line with the idea of self-defense.
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To use a gun for defending oneself would have been like using a hatchet to cut vegetables.
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It would work, but the idea was just kind of outlandish.
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So this interpretation seems to indicate that the Second Amendment doesn't protect the right to gun ownership.
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Rakove and Cornell are both equally esteemed and qualified constitutional scholars, and each of them can lead us down different paths with the Second Amendment.
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These are just two examples, but there are endless more.
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Modern America has not been able to reach a conclusion on the Second Amendment because a lot of intelligent,
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qualified individuals have wildly differing interpretations of the text.
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Even the federal interpretation of the Second Amendment has swung wildly throughout time,
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For decades and decades, courts agreed that the Second Amendment did not protect individual rights to gun ownership.
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Rather, early Americans read the Second Amendment as protecting the existence of militias.
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However, in 2008, Supreme Court justices declared that the Second Amendment does in fact protect the right to individual gun ownership.
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Even still, this decision came with its fair share of conditions.
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Antonin Scalia, noted that firearms were subject to restrictions and regulations.
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The point of all of this is not to come to a conclusion on constitutional law.
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There are a lot of other Second Amendment stones I have left unturned here, and that is intentional.
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It is not my desire to advocate for any particular reading of the amendment, but rather we can take all of this to understand two things.
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First, the founding fathers believed that people should be allowed to keep rifles at home.
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This is included in the Bill of Rights.
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Second, America has never really known what to do about this.
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The Second Amendment has continuously been interpreted and reinterpreted as the basis for wildly divergent opinions and pieces of legislation.
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As we move forward past the 18th century, America's gun culture truly begins to take shape.
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In the mid-19th century, guns were still not seen as instruments of violence.
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Instead, they were tools.
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They were more shovel than sword.
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This was perhaps in part because they just didn't work very well.
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These guns were clunky, unreliable, inaccurate, and generally troublesome tools.
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But then a young man named Samuel Colt got to work.
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Around this time, Texans were fighting against the Comanche tribe.
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More accurately, they were trying to kill off the Comanches entirely.
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After hearing a remarkable battle story from a Texan named Sam Walker, Colt realized that firearms could have some romance about them.
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They could be more than tools.
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Guns could have some emotional meaning.
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So Samuel Colt began a massive marketing campaign.
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He associated his guns with the so perceived bravery of defending America against foreigners and Native Americans alike.
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Just as early colonists had, Colt framed violence as a premier strategy for settling disputes.
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Samuel Colt sent free merchandise to politicians, he circulated pamphlets, he hired a famous painter to depict scenes of Colt guns saving American lives.
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Other firearms manufacturers soon followed suit.
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They all focused their efforts on handguns, which could be produced quite cheaply in America.
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For a long time, guns had been prohibitively expensive.
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That was no longer the case.
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Manufacturers like Colt made cheaper and cheaper handguns.
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In 1850, a Colt revolver was $12.
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By the year 1900, a .22 caliber Colt could be had for 18 cents.
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The country also had fewer restrictions on firearms than Europe, which alone incentivized gun ownership.
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People could, so they would.
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These newer, smaller guns were also quite convenient.
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They were more reliable than past firearms and could be neatly tucked away into the beltline.
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Combine all of this with an effective marketing campaign, and firearms like the new Colts were immensely successful.
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These guns made it easier to kill people.
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Strangling or beating a person to death brought an immense amount of risk.
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You could get hit There's also a lot of thought that had to occur before, during, and after such an act.
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Rifles were too cumbersome and bulky to carry around on one's person.
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There were essentially barriers to entry as far as violence was concerned, but handheld revolvers and handguns broke these down entirely.
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Now within a second or two you could kill a man without a whole lot of effort, psychological or physical.
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During In the 14 years when these changes were happening, firearms ownership ballooned to 10 times what it had been at the turn of the century.
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This reality was occurring against an increasingly violent backdrop.
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As the country hurled itself towards a civil war, America was becoming more and more homicidal.
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With the proliferation of slavery, there arose a new group which Americans desired to control.
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Taking cues from their forefathers, slave owners and other Americans used widely available firearms to control African slaves.
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Homicide rates skyrocketed across the nation in a time that is often called the Riot Era.
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Alongside this, increasing industrialization was making American cities more bountiful and more populated.
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This surge in productivity required more labor.
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So immigrants began to pour into America's largest cities.
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They were met with rampant xenophobia, which often translated to violence.
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Some American political parties declared that these immigrants, Scottish, Irish, and German, would bring with them violence,
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and that increased immigration meant increased danger for Americans.
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All of this, the violence and the proliferation of firearms, just spread and spread.
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The American West became the Wild West as prospectors clashed with Native Americans.
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So across the entire country in the late 1800s, American violence was again in its ascendancy.
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Gun violence had worked for the colonists, it had worked for the revolutionaries, so now it was working for post-Civil War Western prospectors,
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Southern Americans, and xenophobic urbanites.
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These conflicts all reflect an idea that guns should be used to settle disputes.
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It is this idea which is perhaps at the core of America's gun culture.
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So for decades that was exactly what happened.
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In the 1900s, America just got more and more homicidal.
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In 1900, the homicide rate was roughly 1 per 100,000 people.
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By 1930, it was almost 10 per 100,000 people.
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Much of this was due to gun violence surrounding prohibition and organized crime.
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America was in a sort of Tommy Gun era, and its impacts were devastating.
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And so, we come to the next major force in America's gun culture.
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The NRA.
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By the 20s, the NRA had already been around for some 50 odd years.
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The group was originally founded to increase marksmanship abilities.
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For decades, they mostly organized shooting competitions.
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But after the Great Depression, the NRA began to drift into the political sphere.
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Their goal, though, was not the loosening of restrictions.
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Often, the opposite was true.
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In the early 20s, the NRA successfully pushed for increased firearms regulation, hoping to ensure that only respectable, serious individuals could own guns.
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President Roosevelt signed two pieces of legislation which regulated commercial firearms sales,
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the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act.
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These two acts imposed paid registration on some weapons and federal registration for gun dealers.
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They also prohibited felons from purchasing guns at all.
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The NRA convinced Congress to exclude handguns from this new legislation, but broadly supported the bills.
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In 1934, the NRA president said in a testimony to Congress, I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns.
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I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.
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The NRA began to change, though, when a new wave of violence came to America.
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After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a wave of riots spread across Baltimore.
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There emerged an increasing level of anxiety and violence around the civil rights movement.
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Richard Nixon was elected president as a law and order candidate.
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One of his first moves was to militarize urban police forces with heavier weaponry.
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And so Nixon continued these traditions of guns
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and violence being used to control a disobedient group and to settle conflict in America.
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Gun violence went again on the upswing.
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Gun homicides increased sharply by 51%.
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Assaults using firearms rose even more by an astounding 84%.
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Guns were also becoming cheaper.
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Inexpensive handguns were being imported from overseas like never before.
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In 1955, 67,000 handguns were imported to the US.
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In 1968, that number increased to about a million.
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At this time, the NRA was still firmly on the side of gun control.
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In 1968, NRA president Harold Glasson said in a lecture,
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Does the right to keep and bear arms mean that every individual has a right to carry a gun at all times, concealed or openly?
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Obviously not.
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This same year, the U.S government passed the Gun Control Act of 1968, prompted by the assassination of President Kennedy.
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However, the conservative movement in America was beginning to change dramatically.
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Increasingly, conservatives saw any and all government regulation as inherently problematic.
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Conservatives placed more and more value on personal freedoms.
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People like Barry Goldwater, Jerry Falwell, and Howard Jarvis pushed legislation under this new anti-government sentiment.
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The NRA was a conservative organization, and so they too underwent a seismic shift almost overnight.
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In the 1970s, a man named Harlan Carter was an increasingly vocal member of the NRA.
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He took a hard-line stance, believing that no amount of firearms legislation was acceptable.
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When asked if violent criminals and the mentally ill should be allowed to own guns, Harlan replied that it was the, quote, price we pay for freedom.
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Harlan wrote a letter to NRA leadership imploring them to take his position, declaring that we can win it on a simple concept.
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No compromise.
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No gun legislation.
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In the mid-70s, Carter would go on to essentially lead a coup against NRA leadership.
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This resulted in him winning the position of executive vice president.
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Under Harlan's leadership, the NRA entered into an entirely new era.
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The new NRA spread a narrative that the U.S government had a secret plan to disarm all Americans.
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The gun, Carter said, was the sole tool for defeating this government oppression.
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Further, Carter's NRA leveraged rising crime rates and racial anxieties to rally support for gun rights.
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This was all a massive success.
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Membership in the NRA tripled under Carter from 1 million to 3.7 million.
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Carter hired a team of lobbyists and activists who racked up victories across the country.
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Several states under NRA guidance added the right to bear arms into their constitution.
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The NRA repeatedly defeated efforts to increase gun control measures on a federal level.
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Even after Carter left his position in the 80s, the NRA continued to find political success.
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They raised $70 million for Republican House Leader Newt Gingrich, and they spread pro-gun messaging throughout important swing state elections.
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Near the turn of the century, the NRA capitalized on the unpopularity of Bill Clinton, tax increases, and failed government reform policies.
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However, as Senator Chris Murphy points out in his book, the NRA accomplished a lot after the year 2000, despite having very little actual power.
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The NRA did not spend a lot of money compared to other lobbyists and super PACs.
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In 2012, NRA endorsed candidates only won one out of seven elections.
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During this time, there was very little statistical electoral advantage to having the NRA on your side.
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Bizarrely, the NRA had become an effective political force without actually having much in the way of political capability.
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Murphy, a politician himself, notes the phenomenon of the squeaky wheel.
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While a small minority of Americans support everything the NRA advocates for, the NRA encourages that minority to be as loud as possible.
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This, of course, skews public perception, which can result in real legislative and electoral action.
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The NRA also has a remarkably strong brand.
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For a politician, the NRA endorsement broadcasts a lot more than gun rights gun rights.
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It's a conservative badge of honor.
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Whether or not the voting population agrees with the NRA on individual policy issues,
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a candidate earning their endorsement can be an important piece of the electoral puzzle.
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Culturally, the NRA also has a significant impact among citizens.
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The NRA, building on centuries of tradition, continues to tie gun ownership to liberty and personal freedom.
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Whether or not you, personally, the viewer, agrees with this notion, it must be said, this is the angle for the NRA.
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They are carrying the torch of their forefathers.
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Like Samuel Colt, the NRA proclaims that guns are more than just objects.
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They are symbols of freedom.
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For a long time, the NRA was viewed quite favorably among Americans, and so this messaging was very successful.
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In recent years, though, they have begun to lose much of this cultural capital.
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But when we put all of this story into a pot, we get the American gun culture.
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Up to this point, I have omitted one perhaps large part of American gun culture.
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Media.
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America is the land of media.
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Much of this media is very violent, and much of it includes guns.
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Research on the correlation between violent media consumption and violent behavior has produced mixed findings.
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This media is a part of the American gun culture, but if we blame violent video games, movies, and music for this culture,
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I think we are looking at the equation from the wrong end.
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After all, violent media does not just erupt out of nowhere and produce violent behavior en masse en masse.
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Video games, movies, music are all created as reflections of American sensibilities.
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Companies produce violent media because America wants violent media.
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These things are part of the existing gun culture and maybe they even exacerbate that culture.
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But they are not the cause of it.
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They are more symptoms than virus.
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It seems to me that America's affinity for guns comes from three places.
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It is the sum of three parts.
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Tradition, rights, and mythology.
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In this country, we have a long-standing tradition of gun violence.
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The landmass was conquered through gun violence.
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The country itself was founded on gun violence.
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Time and time again, social conflicts have been solved through the means of force, often with a firearm.
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This macro tradition has leaked into the micro.
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For some Americans, guns are now a legitimate way to settle disputes or control groups of people.
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The right to own guns is expressed in the American Bill of Rights rights.
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The country was founded with firearms in mind in one way or the other, but due to aging language, changing times, and increasing polarization,
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there is little agreement on how exactly America should protect this right.
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Guns have a profound mythological meaning in America.
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In the very early days of the country, capitalists began active efforts to galvanize the mythology of guns within American culture.
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They were successful and this is a process which has not stopped.
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Its effects have not abated.
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For hundreds of years American companies and organizations have produced messaging that ties guns directly to American identity.
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All nations around the world have their collective cultural interests.
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Guns are the American incarnation of this phenomenon.
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Gun control activists say that something must give, that gun violence is out of control, and that we simply must act.
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More often than outright removal of firearms, activists often demand a compromise that takes the form of increased gun regulation.
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The other side says that we already have regulations in place, that they already have compromised.
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They point to the thousands and thousands of gun laws which already exist on federal, state, and local levels.
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This debate just It goes on and on and I'm not really sure what the path forward is.
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But I do think that understanding the gun within American history and mythology could be a good place to start.
Por que praticar fala com esse vídeo?
O vídeo "Why America (Still) Loves Guns" é uma excelente oportunidade para aprimorar sua prática de conversação em inglês por meio do shadowspeak (ou shadow speech). Sua linguagem clara, mas repleta de expressões cotidianas e argumentos estruturados, ajuda a treinar a escuta, a pronúncia e a fluência. Ao imitar a entonação e o ritmo do narrador, você aprende a articular ideias complexas, como discussões sobre cultura e estatísticas, de forma natural. Além disso, o tema controvérsia estimula a reflexão, o que torna o aprendizado mais envolvente e memorável.
Gramática e expressões no contexto
Analise essas estruturas chave do vídeo para melhorar sua fala:
- "Compared to similar countries...": A expressão "compared to" é essencial para fazer comparações. No vídeo, ela é usada para contrastar a violência nos EUA com outros países. Pratique frases como "Compared to my city, this town is quiet" para dominá-la.
- "The answer here is complicated": "Is complicated" é uma forma simples de indicar que uma questão não tem uma resposta direta. Use-a em conversas para evitar generalizações, por exemplo: "The problem with climate change is complicated".
- "Guns are currently and have always been part of...": A estrutura "are currently and have always been" combina tempo presente e passado para mostrar continuidade. Isso é útil para falar de tradições: "Football is currently and has always been the most popular sport in Brazil".
Armadilhas de pronúncia comuns
Algumas palavras no vídeo podem ser desafiadoras. Preste atenção:
- "Firearms": A pronúncia correta é /ˈfaɪərɑːrmz/ (não "fai-re-arms"). Note que o "e" no final de "fire" é silencioso, e o "a" em "arms" tem um som longo.
- "Homicides": Diga /ˈhɑːmɪsaɪdz/ (não "ho-mi-ci-des"). O destaque está na primeira sílaba, e o "c" tem som de "s".
- "Colonists": A pronúncia é /ˈkɑːlənɪsts/ (não "co-lo-nis"). O "o" tem som curto, e o "i" é fraco, quase silencioso.
Use o shadowspeaks para repetir essas palavras junto ao vídeo, ajustando seu acento até que fique natural. Essa prática ajudará você a se comunicar com clareza em situações reais.
O que é a Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing é uma técnica de aprendizado de idiomas com base científica, originalmente desenvolvida para o treinamento de intérpretes profissionais. O método é simples, mas poderoso: você ouve áudio em inglês nativo e repete imediatamente em voz alta — como uma sombra seguindo o falante com 1-2 segundos de atraso. Pesquisas mostram melhora significativa na precisão da pronúncia, entonação, ritmo, sons conectados, compreensão auditiva e fluência na fala.