My steadfast ideology concerning gun control is this: there should be no gun control. The second amendment guarantees every citizen of the United States of America the right to bear arms. That is, the right to protect yourself and your family from harm. The right to bear arms is a privilege that was paid for with the blood of our founding fathers. It is safe to say that a right which cost the lives of many to secure, was not done so with out reason. It is because of these reasons that the rejection of gun control is one of my unwavering ideologies.
I was raised in a republican family, lived not ten miles from the National Rifle Association, and was taught to shoot at a young age. It is for these reasons that I am not afraid of guns, as many people tend to be, and I feel that owning a gun for recreation and protection--that is, owning a gun as a instrument of survival--is a constitutional right that should not be discarded.
The main arguments I have encountered against my stance are these:
-the person/people are afraid of guns and could never use one for self protection or any other purpose
-the person/people feel that it is dangerous to have a fire arm in the house because of children living on the premises
-the person/people fear a intruder finding a gun in their home and using it against them
-the person/people feel that their is no reason to have self protection methods because if they are meant to die...than it is simply their time.
I have be involved in many rhetorical situations focusing on the topic of gun control both in oral conversation and through prose. After personal experiences and research I have developed several arguments to persuade others to accept, or at least consider, my stance on the issue. Rhetorical strategies involving appeals of ethos and logos tend to work nicely, since their is a multitude of statistics that favor gun control as being unconstitutional and dangerous. For example, if people can not get guns citizens will be left with no means of protection while criminals will revert back to using more base, brutal, and violent means of weaponry. These types of arguments make a person consider you point of view but it is when you bring in the pathos appeal the necessity for self protection becomes real. After all, emotions are one of the strongest influencing factors of persuasion in our society.
The most effective pathetic proofs I have employed in the topic of gun control is deploying the power of enargeia. Painting a picture for the audience, in which the audience's loved ones are put in a horrific, life endangering event makes the opposition see the relevance and necessity of preserving their right of protection. People often have opinions on self preservation/protections, but when their loved ones are in jeopardy. . . no sound person would just stand by and watch a loved one die when they have the power to save them. The following is a pathetic appeal in which enargeia is deployed to persuade a audience to abolish the idea of gun control:
*** It is two o'clock in the morning on a snowy February night. Your daughter is sound asleep in her bed having been dreaming pleasant dreams for hours. You are up late browsing the Internet and drinking a glass of wine to wind down from a long day. Through your front window a man has seen a valuable big screen TV. Thinking everyone is asleep, he picks a random window to a room he believes to be vacant. He takes the blunt end of a large army knife and breaks the window, unlocks it and enters the room. The intruder has entered your daughters room. You hear this, knowing what is going on you run towards your daughters room, baseball bat in hand--ready to fight for the protection of your family. You open the door and see that just before your daughter was able to let out a scream the intruder covers her mouth and cuts her throat knowing that you will be unable to harm him from where you stand.***
If the parent had been able to grab a gun instead of a bat, then the intruder may have been the person who died that night.
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