Killing Country


 This series starts as a typical true-Crime documentary, in which it begins with loving interviews of the families who have lost a loved one due to crime. But in most of these documentaries, the person that they are talking about is the victim of the crime. In this one. The person that they are talking about, at least initially according to the police, was the criminal. The series then goes on to explore, if not the corruption of a local police force, certainly the incompetence of it. In fact, this small community had the highest per capita rate of citizens being killed by the police in all the country. It's an important issue, but I feel that the documentary doesn't do it justice. I think generally, American True-Crime documentaries are in a blind spot when it comes to crime. What I mean by that is the topic of guns is not touched upon at all. The police could certainly be trained more and better. I think that it is ridiculous that a police officer can be trained in the United States in a period of 4–5 weeks, whereas in other countries it's an actual college program of four to five years. While that certainly causes the clearance rate for murder cases to be below 50% in the United States and causes a myriad of other problems, it's not the reason there are so many murders in America. The reason is that there are three guns for every person in the United States. If there is a crime in Canada or Mexico that involves a gun, most likely that gun was smuggled from the United States. People in the United States take guns to church to grocery shopping, and remarkably there are even rules in the United States saying that you can take an unloaded gun on a plane. The problem is the cult of the gun. And any attempt to regulate this horrific situation is met with cries of they're taking away your freedom, they want to impose tyranny upon the United States. But the objective fact is that there are countries with a great amount of freedom that have gun control measures. In fact, regulation of firearms is one way to guarantee that freedom. Because if you do not have to be scared of being shot in school, the grocery store, in a church, or on a plane, you have a much greater level of freedom. Unfortunately, I think that American culture now equates Freedom with anarchy. Anarchy, not in the philosophical or political Theory sense but in the actual literal sense, means an absence of laws. Regulations that are fair, applied to everyone equally, are those things that guarantee freedom. Just ask yourself would you rather live in Switzerland or Somalia?


Leverton Review 2/5

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