teen murder

        This is the article I found. in this case two kids under 18 are being tried as adults for the murders of 70-year-old Paul Brian Brooks and his 69-year-old wife, Margaret. The two kids are Anthony Zarro, 17, and Christopher Allen, 16. These two boys are being charged with first degree murder and are going to be tried as adults for this case. The couple died from being stabbed and blunt force trauma to the head. From what i have read there are no real motives for this crime, it was just an act of violence. these two boys a couple days before this crime had ran away from a camp for youths at risk, so this is probably not the first bad thing they have done, although it did not say what they were there for. The family issued a statement which is in my second link if you would like to read it. The trail has not yet finished so this is all i know.
            Brain research could play a role in this case, because this kids diffidently have something something wrong with them, or their brain is wired differently, because that's the only way i can wrap my head around how somebody could do this to another person for no evident reason. It makes me wonder if these kids are fit to stand trail, or if they are mentally ill.
             If it were illegal to try kids as adults i think it would change this case a lot, sense they are currently being tried as adults. These kids would get a lot less severe punishment for what they did, whether that's right or wrong is why there is so much controversy if we should try kids as adults.  On the other hand if we could try kids as adults this case would not change much. this is a great example of why we should be allowed to try kids as adults, where they make such irrational decisions.
             If i was a judge i would listen to this case and i would diffidently try these kids as adults because what they did has not rational excuse.

kids or adults

           Should a child under 18 be tried as an adult if he commits a crime. this is not an easy question and certainly not one you can answer with just a one sentence answer. This is kind of a loaded question, because no two cases are the same and you might think one kid should be tried as an adult and another one shouldn't.  This brings up the question of where do we draw the line and how strictly we enforce it. How do we judge if one teen should go to prison and another on goes to juvenile hall? I don't believe kids should be able to be tried as adults in court because we never treat as adults in any other situation. If your under 18 society views you as not mature enough to buy drinks, gamble, or fight in a war. So why should kids be viewed as adults when they mess up. I don't think that this is fair, because we are sending kids a mixed message. Although in some extreme cases where kids plan out and murder somebody i think they should be held to the standard of an adult, because some people are just born bad and nothing anyone can do will fix it.

On Patrol

Ryan Gustafson

Mrs. Guerard

Per.3

3/12/11

                                                                                 On Patrol

I would like to write about the short story On Patrol by Ron Kovic. On Patrol is a short story about the atrocities of war and how much harm and destruction war can cause on the lives of innocent civilians. Vietnam I think is kind of poster war when it comes to this idea that war is extremely harmful to everyone, but especially the innocent people that are living there. I say Vietnam is the poster war because so many people were against it, and thought that we were doing more harm than good by being there. I think for the people that were against the war, they hear about an event like this is and think that this is normal and happening all the time. In this short story by Ron Kovic there are a group of soldiers that walk up on this village. They can hear things going on inside one of the buildings, but they don't know what it is. They suspect that it’s the North Vietnam army, so they all were getting scared and very high-strung. Then all of a sudden one of the men fired and when that guy fired everyone started firing without knowing what they were shooting at. After the barrage of bullets were over the men walked up and looked at what they had been shooting at. It was not what they were expecting at all. What they found was a bunch of little kids and an old man, that were either dead or several wounded. It was a horrible seen as you could image.

That short story is similar to the chapter the man I killed in The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. It is similar in the sense of its brutality. This chapter talks about how one man killed another one, and its form his point of view. He describes all the injuries that he had caused in that man in detail. It is the same kind of gruesome behavior that was in On Patrol. Then the chapter goes on and O’Brien talks about his guilt towards killing that young man. He describes how small the man he killed was. “He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty.” O’Brien starts to make up a story about the young man to try and make himself feel better from what he has just done. He thinks he was born into a family of farmers in 1946 and only wished for the Americans to leave. He thinks that the man might have been a hard worker and liked school, and had a love for math. Maybe the man went to the University of Saigon to try and study math. Another soldier, Kiowa, tries to comfort O’Brien by saying that the man he killed would have done the same thing to any one of them, and then asks him if he would rather trade places with the young man.

Another way these two stories are similar is how after a soldier or a group of solders do something, the guilt they feel once they have realized what they have really done. Again I think this speaks to the idea that America should not be involved in Vietnam, and we are doing more harm than good by being there. Both of this stories were written by soldiers, but it makes me think that even some of the soldiers thought that America was wrong in involving themselves in Vietnam problems. These two stories make you think that we were not only making it worse on the people in Vietnam, but also for our own soldiers who did and witnessed horrible things that will scare them for the rest of their lives.

Vietnam

I picked this photo from Vietnam because it shows how big this country is and how beautiful it really is. it also shows some of the destruction that we caused this beautiful land with all of the burnt down trees. I don't know if some plane bombed this side of the hill or weather there was just a natural forest fire that burnt all of these trees to the ground. However i have a feeling that this was not a product of natural causes. I get this feeling because of the solider sitting down at the top of the hill as if hes looking back at what they have just done, trying to take it all in.
Knowing that the average age for a solider in this war was 19, that made me think, what if in a year when i am 19 i was in a situation like that? what would i do? I cant even imagine myself in the same circumstances as that solider on top of the hill. its scaring to think kids around the same age as me were really fighting in a real war, killing others or getting killed themselves.
You cant see the mans face in this photo because he isn't facing the camera, but you can get a sense of who he is. Lets call him Dave. Right now it looks like Dave is relaxing not doing anything important. Photos like this made the people back home question why America was over there and if we were really doing anything helpful or productive

racial profiling

racial profiling is an issue in america and the rest of the world. nobody should ever judge someone by the color of their skin. i dont think we should practice racial profilin, because when you do a whole group gets effected for the actions of a small group of people.  after 9/11 at airports everyone that looks like they are from the middle east is checked a little more closely than others. there is no evidence that somebody that looks middle eastern is more likely to do something bad then any other kind of race, so why are they treated like they are.everybody should be treated the same.