{"id":1097,"date":"2015-08-12T00:47:08","date_gmt":"2015-08-12T05:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/rhes306\/?p=1097"},"modified":"2015-08-12T00:47:08","modified_gmt":"2015-08-12T05:47:08","slug":"guns-dont-kill-people-people-kill-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/rhes306\/2015\/08\/12\/guns-dont-kill-people-people-kill-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Guns Don’t Kill People, People kill People"},"content":{"rendered":"

Martin, Donald. “LETTER: Guns Don’t Kill People, Etc.”\u00a0 articles.courant.com, \u00a0Hartford Courant.\u00a0 <\/em>19 Mar. 2013. Web. 11 Aug. 2015<\/p>\n

In this article, Martin discusses an experiment that he performed and gives us his results. His experiment mocks\u00a0the idea that people who\u00a0want guns to be banned\u00a0believe that guns are the ones who kill people. Martin says how he positions his shotgun in a wheelchair on his front porch\u00a0to\u00a0see\u00a0how many people it will kill. He mentions how many people pass by and yet when he comes back to check on his shotgun it had\u00a0not killed anyone. He furthers this with, “It\u00a0had not even loaded itself.”\u00a0He also says how “surprised”\u00a0he was\u00a0because of all the people arguing about guns being dangerous and to find out guns are not the ones who kill people but people who misuse them do or he is “…in possession of the laziest gun in the world.”\u00a0 Martin ends his letter with another\u00a0representation by saying, “So now I’m off to check on my spoons, because I hear they make people fat.”<\/p>\n

Clearly Martin is targeting those who are non advocates of guns. He does this in a ironical way by presenting the gun with human characteristics. Martin claims that these non advocates are over exaggerating on guns by banning them. It is true, unrealistically speaking that guns are\u00a0the ones who kill people\u00a0but rather people who handle guns do. In this case, people with guns kill many people, more than they would if they didn’t have guns. People get angry and upset all around the world. Yet, there aren’t any mass shootings every few weeks in Japan for example or in England. The reason for this would be because residents\u00a0of those places who have these impulses don’t have easy access to lethal weapons and unlimited ammunition.\u00a0On the other hand, in America it is not difficult to find these firearms because they are everywhere.<\/p>\n

Martin’s argument about\u00a0people being the problem other than guns is not backed up with any evidence. Instead he only uses a fictional situation\u00a0making his\u00a0statement invalid. He argues that , “the media is wrong and the killing is\u00a0by people\u00a0misusing guns.” Although guns don’t have a mind of their own, the purpose of a firearm is to kill and extinguish a life with the\u00a0minimum amount of effort possible.\u00a0These weapons are made to kill\u00a0at a great distance, speed and lethality. When these weapons do their job in a\u00a0mass shooting, there is an endless list\u00a0of excuses blaming things other\u00a0than the gun itself. Making Martin’s argument about guns not killing people inaccurate\u00a0because in reality they do. Though it is not relevant to the way Martin puts his dispute.<\/p>\n

Overall, the way Martin approaches these controversy affects\u00a0the effectiveness it would\u00a0have on his audience. Readers would think he is not trustworthy because\u00a0he mocks those who don’t agree with him or are on his side of the argument. His response to those who think guns are dangerous is immature and makes his justification seem less convincible.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Martin, Donald. “LETTER: Guns Don’t Kill People, Etc.”\u00a0 articles.courant.com, \u00a0Hartford Courant.\u00a0 19 Mar. 2013. Web. 11 Aug. 2015 In this article, Martin discusses an experiment that he performed and gives us his results. His experiment mocks\u00a0the idea that people who\u00a0want … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":82,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-post-4"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/rhes306\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/rhes306\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/rhes306\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/rhes306\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/82"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/rhes306\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1097"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/rhes306\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1154,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/rhes306\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097\/revisions\/1154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/rhes306\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/rhes306\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/rhes306\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}