Group Project: Guns in America

The making of this project was a bit of an emotional roller coaster. While all of the other topics we've studied with the other groups have been very interesting and incredibly important to discuss, "Guns in America" was the only one that I felt I've been directly affected by or that I could relate to most. Watching the After Parkland documentary in class genuinely brought tears to my eyes and doing the research for our slides really just made it all feel so much more real.

Gun violence is a virus that plagues America. We see it in every state, dozens of cities, multiple shootings every single day, many of which don't even get media coverage. It's an obvious problem that affects each and every one of us, so why hasn't it been stopped? I won't go into too much detail since we already did that in our presentation but I do firmly believe this country needs stricter gun control laws or even to just ban guns altogether (though I do realize this is no easy feat, I'm not that naïve). This is my opinion now and it was my opinion before I even did this project. If anything, researching for this project only strengthened my opinion.

I'm immensely grateful for my fellow group members for making this project all come together. I think we struggled a bit with our cohesion and motivation at first but once we got the hang of it we were able to create a masterpiece. I think our presentation went really well and I wish we had a bit more time for class discussions because I was really interested in the thoughts and ideas our presentation sparked within our peers. And a huge shoutout to CJ for basically being the queen of the project and for taking up such a role of leadership, both during the presentation and behind the scenes. Unfortunately, I think my group was plagued with procrastination. We were the last group to present, giving us plenty of time to work on our project, and then we were given even more time when class was cancelled on the day of our presentation, yet a few of us still didn't even finish our slides until we didn't have much time left. This is entirely our fault and in the future we should make sure we take better advantage of our time and have better communication.

Overall, this was such an intriguing project and I'm glad I got the opportunity to study this topic. I'm excited for what I'll get to learn for our next round of presentations.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Class Video: "Building Connections: How to Be A Relationship Ninja | Rosan Auyeung-Chen | TEDxSFU"

Video link:  Building Connections: How to Be A Relationship Ninja | Rosan Auyeung-Chen | TEDxSFU Being in my first year of year of college, making connections is a big part of my life right now. It's my first time living away from my family, my first time at such a big school, and my first time not being constantly surrounded by people I'm close to and comfortable with. So when I first got here, I was immediately confronted by the importance of learning to make connections or else my next four years would be really lonely. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at making connections. I'm really shy and introverted and insecure and I tend to get anxious and overwhelmed during social situations. So watching this video was actually quite helpful to me, as Rosan Auyeung-Chen was able to give me some decent insight and advice on the process of making connections. That being said, I would disagree with the idea that there's a step-by-step instructional process for making connec...
Read more

Class Video: "The myth of race | BBC Ideas"

 Video link: The myth of race | BBC Ideas Before watching this video, I didn't understand what people meant when they said that race is a social construct. I always thought that since people have physical characteristics that can indicate their race, that must mean that race is ingrained into our DNA in some way. I was blown away by the idea that I could have a closer relation of genomes with some random person of some random other race than I could with someone of my same race, but that makes the argument that race is a social construct make so much more sense to me. Since there's really nothing in our DNA that indicates our race then that must mean that race is something assigned to us by society. To be honest, race is something I've always been confused by in the sense that I'm not really sure what my race even is. I know I'm Hispanic on my dad's side and White on my mom's side. I've always identified more with my Hispanic side but am I Hispanic enoug...
Read more

Group Video: "Lock-Up: The Prisoners of Rikers Island"

There were many things that stood out to me while watching this film. The first thing I noticed was how a lot of the prisoners were still wearing their own clothes instead of some sort of prison uniforms. In a lot of movies and pieces of media we see prisoners forced to wear a uniform in order to strip them of their individuality (everyone's familiar with the black-and-white stripes or the bright orange jumpsuits) but that wasn't the case in this real-life prison. Another thing I noticed was the immense amount of segregation on Rikers Island. In the prison, not only are male and female prisoners separated but even gay prisoners had their own facility. Additionally, the prisoners would even separate themselves by race within their facilities. Lastly, it was somewhat disturbing to see just how many prisoners accepted the idea that that was their life now. We were introduced to some prisoners who had practically made homes out of their cells, with all their clothes and furniture a...
Read more