Why Hanguns Must Be Outlawed ( Nan Desuka) - Essay Example

Besides the appropriate premises for gun control, she articulates the ethical concerns for the free availability of weapons in America. Whether guns are the weapons of threat or the tools of comfort, is the issue about her deliberations. She uses the tool of pathos to seek sympathies for the people who are able to save their lives with the availability of the weapon in serious life-and-death situations. But the same technique is also employed to highlight the contrary view by elucidating how people lost their lives or injured seriously, for no fault of theirs with the gun, though legal.

Thus her argument is comprehensive and it includes the logical, sentimental and ethical angels and it demonstrates how complicated the issues involved are. If gun control is compared to the heart, arguments are like the alternative beats of the same heart. She makes a mention of two slogans impacting the entire gamut of the issue: “Guns don’t kill people: criminals do” (Desuka n. p.) and “Guns don’t kill people: people kill people.” (Desuka n. p.) On a closer scrutiny of the statements on the portals of the mind of an individual who hears them, she weighs the impact of the dilemma related to the choice between the two in the sentimental world of the hearer.

The statement that criminals kill people indicates the use of pathos. It creates resentment in the heart of the hearer about the criminal with the malicious intentions of the weapon to commit heinous acts, including murder. In stating ‘people kill people’ she highlights a bigger story which is a truthful assertion. She channelizes the hatred towards a section of society, the criminals, to an issue of negligent attitude of free availability of guns to one and all. This hearty appeal is an expression through the rhetorical application of logos.

Desuka shows awareness of the issue from all ends, and she knows the importance of man behind the production of guns and the man using the guns, for good or bad intentions. It is a peculiar situation of dual responsibility. It is like the scale of justice, in which both arms of the scale are important to strike the correct balance. Desuka employs logos by methodically tendering the fact which indicates how criminals alone do not indulge in killing persons with handguns. The number of the criminals who commit murders is low as compared rapists or robbers.

The statistics would give the relevant information. “About 30% murders are committed by robbers or rapists. More than 60% of all murders are caused by guns and handguns are used in more than 70% of these.” The author argues like a sociologist, when she asserts that “majority of these crimes is committed by known assailants and they can said to be crimes of passion or accidents.”(Desuka, n. p.) This is a pointer to the lacuna in her arguments. Desuka’s basic premises have shortcomings that cannot be corrected.

She is trying to offer solutions to a hardcore secular issue, through flowery philosophical leap. Her argument is—“outlawing handguns will remove them from both the criminal and the non-criminal, thereby eliminating handguns as a cause of death, either intentional or accidental.”(Desuka, n.p.) A law may be perfect; in other words there is no dearth about perfect laws. The shortage is in the area of perfect human beings to implement the laws. What then, is the procedure to mold perfect human beings?

Wise men have written millions of pages, but the possibility of the entire humankind turning perfect is remote, nay impossibility. So handguns will be there, and dominate the affairs of the society, as total enforcement of laws is not possible. And no force on earth can totally eliminate the manufacture and