Kyle Crislip Shooting an Elephant “When a man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.” The particular sentence in the story “Shooting an Elephant” sums up and explains many of the problems of humankind throughout history. Nevertheless, humankind keeps making the same mistakes repeatedly and gives into peer pressure and keeping up an image rather than listening to the heart. In the story “Shooting an Elephant,” a young British police officer is in charge of a small neighborhood in lower Burma. He is not liked by the townspeople because of his nationality and has to put up with a lot of teasing and disrespect from them. Their laughter and disrespect got on his nerves and made his job feel impossible. At the same time, he didn’t seem happy with the way or reason that his own people were ruling over the Burmese people. He felt that he was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British, which were his own people. He hated his job more than he could express in words and couldn’t wait to get out of it. He seemed to feel powerless about his beliefs and the way he was feeling, so he just “fell in line” and did what he was supposed to do. One day something happened that gave him a better understanding of the motives of governments in acting the way they do sometimes. He received a message from another officer at a police station in the other end of town that an elephant had escaped from its handler and the handler had gone in the opposite direction to look for it. The elephant was causing quite a disruption and the other police officer wanted him to take care of it. Some of the Burmese people and the other inspector were waiting for him when he arrived. He had a small rifle that was not big enough to kill an elephant, but he thought the noise would scar the elephant, and he did not intend to actually, shoot the elephant. He questioned the villagers to figure out the elephants whereabouts and found out the elephant had trampled an...