Civil Liberties And Crime:Through Reducing Crime Can We Still Keep Liberty? Essay, Research Paper
Do the ends justify the means? Upon first contemplation of how it could be thought that by reducing crime one takes away liberty, I was confounded. I couldn’t envision a situation where it would be necessary to remove liberty in order to reduce and possibly even eliminate crime. I couldn’t, however, only until I heard that we had bombed Iraq and were in the country with our troops. In listening to news stories and President Clinton’s speech of why this had happened I couldn’t shake the thought that there purpose was hypocritical. The United States, as a leader of the world, always feels the need to take care of everything and everyone. This is a wonderful attitude, however, I have noticed that we don’t use it the way we make it seems that we do. Rather than mending problems, more often than not we enlarge them and even create conflicts that were never existant. By sending our troops over to another country to teach the lesson that if that country does not comply with us we will inflict harm upon them, is a highly irrational way of thinking. Our purpose in going to Iraq with our troops was to remove and destroy all nuclear weapons. Yet, to go through with our “good deed” we in turn try to prevent violence, death, and warfare with those very same mechanisms. However strongly that I disagree with the way that America is abusing this country and its people, I can not say that it wouldn’t be for their best to be under the power of the United States. Iraq is led by a dictator in the sense that the country has very little if any crime within its boundries, but only through means of depriving the people of liberties that here in America are freely and naturally given to us. The people of that country live in a state of police. They are continually deprived of rights that here in America we view as natural born rights, for example, the freedom of speech. In taking this into consideration and with all things said, I can not say that I believe that by reducing crime to that low of a level you will still be able to keep liberty. By enforcing laws, one is automatically already setting limits. In setting limits we deprive people from engaging in certain behaviors- thus, restricting them. In regards to America’s weak attempt of trying to salvage the world, I don’t believe that their methods can be justifiable. Similarly, I disagree with enforcing a state of police on a country in order to reduce violence and crime. In either situation, the countries are failing to see that although they are preventing acts of cruelty and crime, they each are compensating for that by being the ones to commit those acts of violence. So then, do their ends justify their means?