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Gun Control & Bad Rhetorical Strategies

Gun Control is a controversial issue that lends itself to bad rhetorical strategies, true of both sides of the issue since both sides are guilty of emotional rhetoric that is not based on logic but appeals to emotions such as fear and sympathy rather than to reason. The results are numerous fallacies of argumentation and the objective is to persuade rather than to present factual evidence of cause and effect. Individuals committing a fallacy often believe that their argument is reasonable, while others resort to lies and other means of deception in their attempt to persuade others to accept their position.

Both sides of the issue are guilty of using the same language and strategies to get their point across. For example, the alarmist title of a book by an anti-gun control organization, Dial 911 and Die by Richard W. Stevens, warns readers that the police have no legal obligation to protect citizens. Republican Congressional Representative Barbara Vucanovich in arguing against the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (also called the Brady bill) used appeal to emotions rather than logic when she linked the bill to the 1990 serial murders in Gainesville, Florida. If the Brady bill had been law then, she argued, "who knows how many more young women would be dead in Gainesville because they had to wait to protect themselves" (137 Congressional Record). Vucanovich's statement is a fallacious argument directed to generate fear, lacking relevancy since she presented no evidence that a handgun waiting period would have made a difference in the serial killings. On the pro-gun control side, Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy is also guilty of fallacies of emotion. In a speech he gave urging passage of the 1981 Handgun Control Act, his main point was that control is needed because of the prevalence of handgun violence. Instead of presenting statistics backed up by factual evidence, he used loaded words and emotional phrases such as "carnag...

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Gun Control & Bad Rhetorical Strategies. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:48, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1704844.html