Imagine yourself walking down a street in your neighborhood on a breezy-late afternoon. The wind is calm, and the air smells like freshly cut grass. The lawn next door is being mowed. You decide to walk down the street. Only five steps later, you step on a dormant landmine, and you are blasted away unconscious by the force of the landmine impact. When you resuscitate in the Intensive Care Unit of the parochial hospital three days later, you attempt to leave bed or at least escape the suffocating sheets. Your nose is flooded with chemicals. Your arm is skewered with painful pinpricks attached to a machine. You understand. You realize the plight of your being in this cataclysmic nightmare. You have lost your right arm. You have no legs. The prosthetic surgeon informs you that you’ll need sixty-thousand dollars if you …show more content…
Because the landmines linger underground even after conflict, in which they don't successfully prohibit soldiers, landmines have ample opportunity to kill and harm civilians in a post-war countries. Landmine Monitor, a program designed to track the deaths or injuries caused by landmines through a series of annual studies and reports, has supported continuously since its first year in 1999 that civilians account for seventy to eighty-five percent of landmine casualties. Most of the countries where these incidents are reported are at peace. A Red Cross International Committee study, “Anti-Personnel Landmines - Friend or Foe?”, concluded that antipersonnel landmines are not indispensable - they play no crucial role in military function and are replaceable if necessary - and have no military value or advantage. Landmines are inefficient, outdated weapons of war that fail to target their intentioned soldiers while having adverse effects on civilian population long after wars end. The United States should sign the Ottawa Treaty to eradicate the use of such terribly misguided