This Won't Convince Me:

A Rhetorical Analysis Of “Government should create stricter gun laws”

By Parker Swayze

Megan Weintraut's argument "Government should create stricter gun laws" was published with commendable timing, and that is possibly its most persuasive element.  Published on Janurary 26^th, less than three weeks after the shooting of nineteen innocents in Tuscon, Arizona, the article seeks to convince every American old enough to vote, and I suspect that most Ithacan readers do not own a gun.  A vigorous attempt is made at establishing a logical aspect of the argument, but this is rendered rather useless when examined by even a mildly informed reader.  There is no attempt made to establish any sense of credibility whatsoever, and this inattention by the author is rivaled only by her almost total lack of acknowledgment and response to the opposing view.  Because of these attributes, Weintraut's essay is far less effective than it could have been.
Her article couldn't have come at a better time though: published only eighteen days after the attempted assassination of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, that left thirteen wounded, and six dead.  The occasion was ripe, and she took advantage, pulling on the heartstrings of every parent with a child enrolled in school when Weintraut mentions the shootings at both Columbine and Virginia Tech.  The pathos stops there though, and the author begins to lose sight of her audience. 
She wastes an entire paragraph explaining why American citizens no longer require guns in order to obtain food for their families.  Every reader already knows that they can just walk into a supermarket and buy a piece of meat; there is no need to reinform us.  Another point she makes without considering her audience is that 68 percent of murders in 2006 involved a firearm.  As an American who does not own a gun, this little fun fact really only makes me want to go buy one so as to protect myself from all the potential gun-owning murderers.
Weintraut does well citing the second amendment though, as it is the most referred to text in the argument against gun control.  She acknowledges the text, and discredits it with a brief discussion of the outdatedness of "maintaining a well-regulated militia" in the modern United States.  This, however, is where both her acknowledgment and response of the opposing view ends.  The purpose of her argument is not that government should make stricter laws regulating the production, distribution, or sale of guns, but rather that government should enact laws making bullets harder to acquire.  It comes across as though she feels that she found some exploitable loophole in the second amendment.  Since bullets are to guns, as food is to human beings, it is hardly reasonable to presume that putting stricter limitations on bullet production, distribution, or sales would fall out of the broad umbrella of precedents concerning the second amendment.  Weintraut's opposition would certainly show too, that the regulation of bullet sales would only create a secondary or "black" market for such commodities; the prices on this new market would be cheaper, as well would be the quality, and the numbers of gang-related homicides involving firearms would almost certainly rise, not fall.  Weintraut’s argument does not account in any way for this seemingly obvious rebuttal.
Which brings me to my next topic of discussion: the author's use of logos, or logical appeals in the article.  Weintraut writes in her article that "90 percent of today’s gang-related homicides involve guns" of some sort (paragraph 3).  The very first thing that came to mind upon reading that statistic, was that less than 10 percent of the guns used in gang-related homicides are acquired legally.  What seems like a staggering fact at first, seems relatively moot once you realize that "stricter gun laws" would have an almost negligible impact on these statistics.  I'm all for the use of logical appeals in an argument such as this, but the relevancy of this piece of evidence just isn't quite there.  In another part of the argument, Weintraut proposes that media is having a negative effect on the way children view violence.  First I have to ask, in what way is this relevant to creating stricter gun laws?  Second, one of the ways she supports this claim, is with the statement, "...the popular video game Grand Theft Auto rewards players for murdering law enforcement” (paragraph 4).  This is just plain false.  Again, I think logic is a great way to go about this argument, but use facts that are actually true.

The argument Megan Weintraut makes is well timed, but clearly not fully thought out.  She makes some good points, but leaves them open to easy rebuttal by her opposition.  Her use of logos also falls far short of what a reader would expect.  For these reasons, her argument is not an effective one.