Florida Shooting

I find it shocking on how often I seem to find myself reading about horrible events like the shooting at the school in Parkland, Florida. I am sure most of you, if not all of you, have been seeing the coverage around the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, but here is some basic information. A nineteen year old male opened fire at the high school on Wednesday. He killed seventeen people with an AR-15, a semi-automatic weapon.

This morning in my cultural diversity class, our topic of discussion surrounded the shooting and gun control in the United States. I realize that there are a lot of controversies and issues surrounding this topic, and I am not going to take any specific side in this post. I simply wanted to share some of what we talked about in class.

My professor had only planned for the discussion to take about ten minutes or so, but, to her surprise, the discussion took thirty minutes and would have gone the whole class time if she had not had us move on to today's activity. The students had all kinds of different views on gun control. Some were completely for it and could not be swayed to see the other side of the discussion. Others were completely against it and did not see any benefit in guns being so available to people. Some were somewhere in between the two views. The discussion began to get pretty heated among the class, but at the end of it all the questions that remained were: when do tragedies like the Parkland shooting stop? and should weapons of a military level be available to people outside of the military? No one could provide the right answer.

The discussion left me thinking. I learned that since the start of 2018 there have been eighteen school shootings in the U.S. alone. It is truly tragic. Last night, the principal at the high school I attended and the one my siblings currently attend sent out an email to all of the families. He said that he sadly is not able to promise that something like the shooting in Florida will not happen at this high school or in the surrounding community. It is scary to think like this but that is the world we seem to live in. I don't know what needs to happen for this to stop being the case, but I know we can always hope for a safer future.

Maze Runner: The Death Cure

Since the first movie of the Maze Runner series premiered in 2014, this series of films has been one of my favorites. It became a tradition to go watch each film with my sister and three of my cousins as soon as it premiered in theaters. We would wait for months for the announcement of the premiere date for the next film and make plans to go see it as soon as it was announced. After having watched the second movie, we waited in anticipation for the third and final film. There was so much that still needed to be answered and revealed. However, this third film took the longest time to be released because of an accident one of the actors suffered on set, but it finally premiered on January 26, 2018, over two years after the premiere of the second film in the series.

I had the chance to see Maze Runner: The Death Cure on Saturday, January 27. I walked into the theater full of excitement and walked out with watery eyes. The movie was nothing like I expected it to be, but it did answer almost all of the questions I still had. I would say it was a lot better than what I had expected because it ended very unexpectedly. The movie was about two and a half hours long and filled with action and suspense. Although the plot took some turns that I didn't see coming ( and didn't necessarily like), I thought it was very well done and worth the wait.

If you are fan of the Maze Runner series, or are looking for movies to watch, I highly recommend this movie and the rest of the series. It is a fantasy/science fiction series with a story line that had me wanting to keep watching. I'll leave the trailer to the final film below.