Gun Control Essay -- Second Amendment The Right To Bear Arms

Gun control in the United States has been a controversial issue for some time now. So much so that the Supreme Court even refuses to address this issue directly. Gun control really boils down to the the Second Amendment of the Constitution. Many people have different interpretations of the Second Amendment and the trenches are dug in deep on this issue. The Second Amendment can not provide the right to bear all types of arms to protect the people from governmental tyranny. If the Second Amendment was absolute, then we would allow the public to possess nuclear weapons, missiles, and other such arms, because like the 9 mm handgun that is an arm, a nuclear warhead is also a type of arm. The more our government restricts our rights to own certain types of arms, the more freedom we lose. Should the government make citizens disclose information such as your views, associations, and personal history in order to obtain an arm? Which types of Arms should be prohibited? The Second Amendment c learly states â€Å"A well regulated Milita, being necessary to the security of a Free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.† The question then is not if we should restrict arms ownership, but how much we should restrict arms ownership or how much freedom we are willing to sacrifice?   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The Second Amendment does not say that certain peoples with certain views are the only ones who are allowed to bear arms. The government must be very careful about what they ask in order not to infringe on our personal rights. I feel that it is wrong for government agencies to ask your political views in order for you to obtain a gun. It is not their right to decide which views are acceptable for gun ownership. The government must provide the right to bear arms equally to all citizens. If the government could completely regulate who had weapons and who didn’t have weapons there would be no equality among the people. The reason being is the government would abusively allow their supports to own weapons and the non supports would be without weapons to defend themselves. This would create an unbalanced society that would install fear in to the non supporters. So where should the government stop? I believe the government should only be able run a cross check wi th some database of repeat offenders and known terrorists. All who don’t raise a ... ...u may think that owning one of these weapons would increase shooting and so forth, but I believe that if you want to shoot someone you are going to do it regardless of what type of weapon you have, and you could possible in danger a lot more people with a now easily obtain legal sniper style rifle. In most states there is no check what so ever other than you age in order to obtain such a gun. On the other hand there are extensive background checks in order to obtain a .22 Cal handgun of much less power. I don’t think that we need to dictate what type of fire arms people own, instead let us set a some other type of limit.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  All things considered, I think criminals are obtaining more and more illegal arms with great diversity while the general publics’ choices in firearms are becoming much thinner and under matched with today’s criminals. We must change the laws to allow our citizens to actually protect themselves from these people. And the government should do only minimal background checks in order to assure society as a whole protection and not its own. Works Citied â€Å"ACLU Policy #47† http://www.lectlaw.com/files/con11.htm Copyright  © William Thomas

Easton Baseball Bats vs. Demarini Baseball Bats

Ever since the invention of the metal bat, creators have been perfecting the specific ingredients to it in order to create the best performance possible for an athlete. Over the past decade, two particular brands of baseball bats have revolutionized the way that players hit the baseball and perform at high levels. The common brands for baseball players are the Demarini and Easton brand baseball bats. Not only are both baseball bats reliable, they also perform at the highest level to create exemplary satisfaction. But an argument remains for both bats; which is the most reliable, which bat is the most effective on the field, and which bat do the players prefer the most? The elements of these particular brands are corresponding in a way to create an exceptional evaluation, but based on overall performance and player nostalgia the Easton bat has the upper hand. The Demarini brand of bats was established with the common goal in mind of revolutionizing the feel of the ball off the bat, and ultimately increasing the velocity of the ball off the bat. As a result, the manufacturer conjured the idea of â€Å"composite† metal, which is a softer and more flexible metal then the normal aluminum used in bats from the past. The baseball would basically bounce off this new type of bat with higher velocity. The composite idea took off, and soon players all over the world loved the feel of this now material as it struck a baseball. Climactically, the new Demarini bat was a better performer on the baseball field than its counterparts; with the exception of the Easton brand. As a result to the evolutional upgrade to the Demarini baseball bat, Easton turned the competition up a notch with the creation of stronger, more reliable bats that lasted a player several years of pertinent performance. Demarini bats were known to crack and lose â€Å"pop† over time, even with the risk of completely breaking! Easton bats were now tougher and more durable than the competitors, specifically Demarini. They also created the perfect balance on the baseball bat. Some bats feel â€Å"top heavy† (more weight is on the end of the bat causing an uneven swing), but Easton perfected balance creating more weight towards the handle. With the upgrades established by Easton, they were now on top of the baseball performance mountain, and no one has touched them to this day. Players across the nation and world have enjoyed the Easton bat’s performance on the field. Organizations have committed specifically to reviewing and studying the performance of baseball bats. According to baseballbat-reviews. com: Easton has produced top-of-the-line sporting equipment and for years has been one of America’s first choices, especially when it comes to aluminum baseball bats. There is no doubt [sic] all of Easton baseball bats will get the job done. Players have also personally shown their appreciation of the Easton baseball bat and how it has improved their performance on the field. John Stalton in Littleton, CO stated to Easton’s personal website, â€Å"†¦this is the best bat I have ever used over the course of 3 years; I will never buy a different brand of bat. † Player nostalgia is the most important argument to proving the level of performance a baseball bat brings to the table, and Easton went above-and-beyond in customer satisfaction. Demarini had many player disapprovals regarding reliability and, sometimes, performance. John Stalton said, â€Å"I have tried to use a Demarini, but it created too many problems. After 2 weeks, there was a rattling in the bat when I swung it. † Performance and reliability are the two major components to how bats are evaluated by players in modern day baseball. The Demarini and Easton brand baseball bats have been widely praised for their performance on the field, but no other brand can compare to Easton’s reliability to the players. Players have voiced their opinions regarding the performance and reliability of these particular brands, and a result; the Easton baseball bat has been considered the best metal bat in baseball today.

Case Study: Neglect

This case involves a 16 year old male and subsequently four of his younger siblings. In elementary school, the client earned â€Å"A† and â€Å"B† grades. However, this did not continue in high school. Additionally, the once active boy began to isolate. He stopped playing basketball and spent more time in the counselor’s office just to avoid the other children as they often made fun of him. The client began seeing the school counselor when he was ten years old. His parents were both alcoholics and were involved in using and selling illegal substances. The living conditions at home were unbearable. There was often no food, electricity, or water in the home. The client reported that the windows were only screen, leaving the home freezing. The client also reported that his parents would lock him and his siblings in their room to ensure they did not tell authorities the truth about what was going on in the house. This typically occurred when the parents got word that the police or the Department of Family Services was on their way over. There was five children in this family, the client was the oldest, four child were currently still in the home. In addition to the neglect the client experienced, he also experienced abuse. This case study mentioned one obvious incident. When the client returned to his parent’s home after staying with his aunt’s because of neglect charge, he came back to school with a broken arm. This was the only indication of physical abuse during this case study, however the client did not discuss what happened. Additional physical abuse or any other type of abuse is unknown. This client was also responsible for his siblings. He made sure they were dressed and feed for school. He also assisted his siblings with their homework. This responsibility left no time for him resulting in poor grades and his social life decreased. The client also displayed symptoms of hopelessness, suggesting depression. The school counselor made note of possible diagnoses, however, it does not appear that the counselor ever made an official diagnosis. The counselor did mention Depression as a primary diagnosis due to the client’s negative doom related vocabulary. Treating this client for depression may be helpful. To meet a diagnosis of Depression the individual must experience at least five of the following symptoms in the same two weeks: depressed mood, weight loss or gain, too much or too little sleep, increased or decreased psychomotor activity, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness, poor concentration, or suicidal ideation. These symptoms must be significant enough to cause marked impairment in work or school. This client did display many of these symptoms. For example, the therapist stated that the client said the word â€Å"hopeless† often. The client also looked underweight, had difficulty in school both academically and socially, and did not receive the proper amount of sleep (DSM-IV-TR). Finally, these symptoms must be more severe than the common blues everyone experiences from time to time. While this client was probably suffering with some degree of depression, there were other factors which better explain these symptoms. This client was the victim of child neglect and abuse. As noted above the children in this family often went without their basic needs. This is a better explanation for the client’s symptoms than depression because when placed in a more nurturing environment, the client’s symptoms dissipated. The client displayed this change in behavior when the courts sent the children to the aunt’s home after the client called the Department of Family Services to file the neglect report. During this time, all the children were going to school clean and feed. The children’s homework, including the client’s was completed. This dissipation of symptoms was seen a second time when the client was placed in foster care. Again, he was going to school clean and feed and with homework completed. Once at his foster parent’s home, the client was also able to go back to playing basketball again. During the course of the client and school counselor relationship, the client saw the counselor on a weekly basis. The school counselor designed these meetings to assist the client in problem solving with regard to caring for his younger siblings. The counselor’s recognition of the client’s needs in this regard was definitely a factor in the client’s ability to make it through this difficult time. This is not always the case in turn causing the client to feel that therapy does not work. Additionally, the counselor did not push the client for information or action so a healthy relationship was able to develop. The counselor was able to slowly earn the client’s trust by showing him she was there for him. This benefited the client in a number of ways. He was able to develop a positive supportive relationship with an adult role model and he was able to gain the courage and strength to put an end to the neglect he was experiencing. As the client progressed in his problem solving and decision making skills the therapist should modify the methods and goals of the therapy sessions. Once the client moved from his biological parents and later adopted, his roles and responsibilities changed drastically. With the new family he lived as a normal child, he was clean, well feed, and rejoined the school’s basketball team. He no longer had to care for younger children in a parenting capacity. At this point therapy should move the focus to resolving the issues of abuse and neglect so the client can come to terms with his past. The use of psychoanalytic therapy would be an appropriate therapeutic method. With this type of therapy the client is able to talk out his issues. With the help of the therapist, the client will learn how to forgive and cope with these issues. What is unfortunate in this case is the fact that the other children ended up going back to the parents. Shortly after that reunification, the old ways came back. However, since the client was not there to act as the caregiver for the other children, the oldest sister took over that role. Here the cycle continues. Although the other children were not as open with the school counselor, they need close monitoring just as their bother received in the past. This close monitoring may be able to stop further neglect and abuse from occurring. Additionally, it would be wise to continue monitoring and providing therapeutic services to this client. There may still be some deep seeded issues he will need to deal with. Finally, the client will need help adjusting to his new family and the issues they have brought him, specifically the separation of his adoptive parents. In addition to ensuring that this client is adjusted in his new life, additional support and therapy can monitor the presence of future mental health related problems. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is often seen in individuals who have experienced abuse. Because of the life situations this client had endured as a child, he is susceptible for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. If this disorder develops, the client will experience flashback type symptoms. This may hinder his ability to cope with past and future life events. Additional problems associated with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder include impulsive behaviors, insomnia, nightmares, avoidance issues, poor concentration, hypervigilance, and increased startle response. Because Posttraumatic Stress Disorder occurs after the individual experiences the trauma, symptoms may not appear until later in adulthood. Also common in individuals with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is alcoholism and substance abuse. Again, this client is at a higher risk for these issues because of the genetic component of both alcoholism and substance abuse. A diagnosis of alcohol abuse or dependence includes behaviors that include neglect of responsibilities. Individuals who abuse alcohol also will continue to use despite the fact that they know it is causing problems in their life both physically and socially. With continued therapy and support, the client will be able to work out these childhood issues and therefore decrease the probability of future problems. Continued support will also give the client the skills necessary to cope with life’s stressful events. The client will be equipped with the tools need to deal with his problems in a healthy way as opposed to turning to drugs and alcohol. Continued therapy will also allow the client to work out any feelings he may have regarding his siblings who were sent back to his parents. This aspect was not noted in the case study; however, he may harbor feelings of guilt or regret, knowing that his siblings are still in a neglectful situation. It would also be beneficial to the client to join support groups in order to increase his support system. References American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-IV-TR. Washington, DC: Author.      

How to Write the University of Pittsburgh Essays 2018-2019

The University of Pittsburgh (colloquially known as Pitt) is a large research university established in 1787. Located in the industrial city of Pittsburgh, Pitt is home to 17 schools and over 19,000 undergraduate students. With an acceptance rate of 60%, Pitt was ranked 26th out of all public universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report in 2018. The university has a thriving academic community, over 350 student clubs and organizations, and is known for its positive campus atmosphere; in 2010, it was rated as having one of the top 10 happiest student bodies in the country. The University of Pittsburgh strongly encourages applicants to write three short essays, granting potential students a great opportunity to showcase multiple facets of their personality, experiences, and interests. Read on for tips to help you master these essays and boost your chances of acceptance into one of the happiest and highest-ranking public schools in the country! This prompt provides you the space to demonstrate your   passions ,   initiative , and   desire to help others . Whether the impact you have made is large or small, the essay should show how you possess each of these qualities. Some good example topics for this essay: While the first example is on a â€Å"macro† scale, the second, more â€Å"micro† example can be equally as powerful if told well. If you decide to go with a smaller-scale impact, make sure it is written as a   story ; use descriptive details that really make the reader feel as though they were also there. While you should be descriptive and   show instead of tell   no matter what you are writing about (see guide to the prompt below for more details on showing vs. telling), it is especially important when writing about an experience that could seem trivial if it is not well-described. Be sure to also illustrate the impact; for instance, for the second example above, the writer could incorporate dialogue between herself and the student when he expresses his gratitude for her reaching out to him. Submit your essay and we’ll get back to you with helpful edits. As briefly discussed in our guide   How to Write the Common Application Essays 2018-2019 , the best response to this question should demonstrate how the intersection of your personality, interests, skills, and analytical-thinking abilities creates a distinctive combination — one that would allow you to contribute in an idiosyncratic way to the college to which you are applying. Taking it one step farther, UPitt is also looking for your ability to reflect. What evidence do you have of your uniqueness? What experiences can you point to that showcase your individuality? You will likely be doing some storytelling here, so it’s extremely important to   show and not tell. Here’s an example of the difference between the two: Note that the â€Å"showing† example also   avoids using any overused adages or clichà ©s , as such sayings can diminish the strength of the experience or emotion you are trying to convey. For example, when explaining the difficulties that come with growing up, writing â€Å"the inevitable blemishes of adolescence† is more distinct and illustrative than saying something like â€Å"the rollercoaster that is high school.† For some of you, this essay will be easy to start – maybe you’ve got an odd family tradition, an uncommon identity, a niche hobby, or even a peculiar birthmark that you could write about. In that case, be sure to point to specific experiences; you could focus on just one moment and tell the story with rich detail, or skillfully connect a few experiences together into one cohesive narrative. The key is to demonstrate your uniqueness through real-life examples and show how this uniqueness will translate into helping you excel at UPitt. But what if you don’t have some extraordinarily special aspect of life to point to? Don’t worry – most of the world doesn’t. The key is to remember that you are still unique! Your specific life experiences, background, personality, interests, and a million other things form a special combination that really cannot be found in anyone else. Try writing out all of your interests, skills, and passions, and then lift out a few from the list. Next, think about how these things come together and make you special. Are there any experiences that show how you, having your distinctive mixture of these separate identities or interests or abilities, were able to meet a challenge, relate to a stranger, help a peer, or learn something new about yourself? Really dig deeply into what you believe is truly unique about you, weave a story that features an experience or two demonstrating that uniqueness, and then show how this will help you contribute something distinctive to UPitt that nobody else can. With this prompt, UPitt wants to see your creativity and problem-solving skills. In other words, you should show the admissions office how you think . The key is to think small when answering this question: what’s a problem you see, and how would you fix it? We suggest you stay away from big national or global issues like â€Å"zero hunger† or â€Å"world poverty.† However, you may be able to concentrate on smaller, more specific issues within these broad zones, and most likely, the problem you’re interested in solving will be somehow related to family or interests or specific life experiences. (Bonus points if you can combine multiple areas of specialty together, drawing on your skills and experiences from two or more different academic or extracurricular areas!) The key takeaway here is that this prompt does not require a well-tested research project that’s been presented at multiple conferences — just pick any problem you see in your daily life and come up with a creative solution for it! As a word of caution, the only constraint is the word limit. While you have 750 words, the UPitt admissions office likely prefers the 200 to 300 range that they’ve suggested. In your answer, you should aim to have a brief background of what inspired your idea, an explanation of your idea, and the potential impact you’d like to see it cause. If you present something that requires a great deal of highly technical explanations, try your best to simplify it down so that any person walking down the street can understand your proposal. And worse comes to worst, pick something else! Remember: your actual product, process, business, or organization doesn’t matter so much as your inspiration and process – the story of your creativity, problem-solving, and compassion. Want help on your Pitt application or essays? Learn about our   College Apps Program. Want us to quickly edit your college essay? Submit it to our   Rapid Review program , and we’ll get it back to you quickly with comments from our expert team.

Medicaid in Texas Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Medicaid in Texas - Essay Example While some states spend as much as 75 percent of every new tax dollar on Medicaid, in Texas the amount is just over 25 percent, still a substantial amount (Recap of 80th Texas Legislature). Budgetary concerns and federal mandates have forced the Texas legislature to successfully implement significant Medicaid reform in the last ten years. The overriding problem for Texas, and Medicaid's biggest impact, has been the escalating costs during the last ten years. Since 1998, the total Medicaid budget in Texas has nearly doubled, and the 80th legislature session in 2007 budgeted almost $20 billion dollars for the program for 2008 of which over $8 billion was from Texas state taxes (State & Federal Medicaid Spending in Texas; Recap of 80th Texas Legislature). Texas's biennial process, and their low level of per capita state taxes has presented Texas with significant financial challenges as they are forced to budget well in advance during uncertain economic times (Kaiser Commission 1). Affected by this uncertainty are the citizens in Texas where Medicaid, "provides health coverage for one out of every three children in Texas, pays for more than half of all births and covers two-thirds of all nursing home care" (State & Federal Medicaid Spending in Texas). The once simple program has expanded to become a complex institution w ith complicated eligibility requirements and federal guidelines. ... In an effort to bring more children under the Medicaid umbrella, the federal government enacted the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in 1997 to cover children who lived in families that earned too much money to qualify for Medicaid assistance. By 2005, 72 percent of the non-elderly participants in Medicaid were children who were eligible for "a full range of health services including regular checkups, immunizations, prescription drugs, lab tests, X-rays, hospital visits and more" (State & Federal Medicaid Spending in Texas). In 2001, the 77th legislature further expanded access to the children's program by eliminating the "face-to-face interview requirements for application and recertification of children's Medicaid benefits in an effort to ensure that Texas Medicaid eligibility verification procedures will be no more difficult than those of the Children Health Insurance Program" (Stout 31). Today, children comprise the largest portion of aid recipients, but the majo rity of the costs are incurred by the elderly and nursing home care. This has prompted Texas to fully implement the SCHIP program and fundamentally change the way Texas finances their health care. Medicaid, and the SCHIP program, have helped move Texas from a system of public hospitals and county health support systems to a system of expanded public coverage (Kaiser Commission). In Texas more than 25 percent of the population is uninsured and their reliance on emergency room care and safety net providers has led to poorer health, higher cost of care, and an increase in insurance premiums in an effort to shift the cost of health care to insurance premium holders (Texas Health and Human Services Commission (1) 3). To alleviate these pressures, Texas has

T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland - Essay Example "What Tiresias sees," Eliot tells us, "is the substance of the poem." But it is the nature of Tiresias' vision that is our concern. There are three principal stories about Tiresias, all of them relevant. In Oedipus Rex, sitting "by Thebes below the wall" he knew why, and as a consequence of what violent death and what illicit amour, the pestilence had fallen on the unreal city, but declined to tell. In the Odyssey he "walked among the lowest of the dead" and evaded predicting Odysseus' death by water; the encounter was somehow necessary to Odysseus' homecoming, and Odysseus was somehow satisfied with it, and did get home, for a while. In the Metamorphoses he underwent a change of sex for watching the coupling of snakes: presumably the occasion on which he "foresuffered" what is tonight "enacted on this same divan or bed." He is often the prophet who knows but withholds his knowledge, just as Hieronymo, who is mentioned at the close of the poem, knew how the tree he had planted in his garden came to bear his dead son, but was compelled to withhold that knowledge until he could write a play which, like The Waste L and, employs several languages and a framework of allusions impenetrable to anyone but the "hypocrite lecteur." It is an inescapable shared guilt that makes us so intimate with the contents of this strange deathly poem; it is also, in an age that has eaten of the tree of the knowledge of psychology and anthropology ("After such knowledge, what forgiveness"), an inescapable morbid sympathy with everyone else, very destructive to the coherent personality, that (like Tiresias' years as a woman) enables us to join with him in "fore suffering all." These sciences afford us an illusion of understanding other people, on which we build sympathies that in an ideal era would have gone out with a less pathological generosity, and that are as likely as not projections of our self-pity and self-absorption, vices for which Freud and Frazer afford dangerous nourishment. Tiresias is he who has lost the sense of other people as inviolably other, and who is capable neither of pity nor terror but only of a fascination spuriously related to compassion, which is merely the twentieth century's special mutation of indifference. The "dissociation of sensibility" cataloged by Eliot's imagery traces the dissociation of individual senses from each other in the absence of any intellectual Aufhebung into a logos. There is a great irony, for example, in Eliot's assertion that "what Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem." Tiresias' blindness should, according to myth, grant him a vision of the truth. What he "sees" in Eliot's poem is a troping of the primal scene in the mechanical copulation of the typist and the young man carbuncular. The metric, the rhyme scheme, and the ending sight of the "automatic hand" that "puts a record on the gramophone" enforce a feeling of remorseless repetition of a scene "foresuffered" a thousand times in memory and desire. Tiresias endlessly sees the scene of the crime, the origin of his own "blinding" or castration in witnessing the difference between men and women. What Tiresias sees is "substance" itself, physical life (or signifiers) unredeemed by spirit (or a tran scendental signified). Eliot's note plays on the philosophic sense of "substance" as essence and tacitly reminds us of its declension into mere matter. In some legends, Tiresias loses his eyes in retaliation for looking upon the naked body of the bathing Athena, goddess of wisdom. In the version from Ovid that Eliot quotes as "of great anthropological interest," we have

High Level business architecture Research Paper

High Level business architecture - Research Paper Example Precisely, high level business needs describe what should be done by a system or any other business solution. For the case of Adopt-A-Farm, it is clear that the company needs to have an online system for collecting their customer and partner views about their experiences in volunteer harvesting and as well list the stories and other help facilities for users of the system. The high level business requirements could therefore be seen as an indication of the reasons as to why a business undertakes an activity (Ross & Robertson, 2006). The requirements are documented as below; The objectives of the high level business requirements for Adopt-A-Farm are to come up with an online system which will increase user participation in the campaign on local farming and purchasing of food products as well as user participation in creation of awareness. It also focuses on having a system for direct user participation in forums and also in commenting about the advantages of local farming. The system should also reach as many people as possible around the globe for the sole reason of creating awareness across nations. The project focuses on listing the stories shared by users about their experiences with consumption of local products in the blog section. From this, users will have a wide variety of content to refer from to gain the taste and to understand the importance of consuming local products and thereafter participating in the campaign with an aim to carb the global warming menace. It also focuses on advising local farmers on the best practices and operations to carry on in their farms which reduce the chances of environmental degradation. Finally, the system will also focus on promoting volunteer harvesting through the creation of a forum for users to comment on their experiences in the exercise. This will be in a bid to encourage people to participate in such exercises whenever they could be having a chance to. Lastly, it is clear that high