Guns or No Guns
Three hundred and twenty-three students have died in documented school shootings over the past 15 years, making it the by far the largest cause of violent deaths in school. A very highly debated topic corresponding with this issue is how to stop it, any many people believe that arming teachers is the way to do it. Many also believe that arming teachers will only make things worse, and that’s what Allen Rostron tries to get across, to parents of teens, in his article Arming Teachers Will Not Reduce School Violence, published in 2012. In this article, Rostron uses many appeals, along with his reputation to provide the reader with statistics to back up his reasoning and to show his knowledge on the topic to persuade readers that arming teachers is a bad idea in the fight against school violence.
Though Rostron uses many appeals throughout his writing to persuade us to his side of view, his reputation precedes him. He is a Professor of Law at the University of Missouri Kansas City and has published multiple articles on gun policy and whether or not guns should be used and how they should be used. To name a few, "Cease Fire: A 'Win-Win' Strategy on Gun Policy for the Obama Administration," Harvard Law & Policy Review, Oct. 28, 2009, "Dodging the Bullet: Tort Immunity for Gun Makers," Jurist, Nov. 3, 2005, and "The Supreme Court, the Gun Industry, and the Misguided Revival of Strict Territorial Limits on the Reach of State Law," Michigan State Law Review, Spring 2003. These are just a few of his articles but you can see how long he has been writing for and the topics he has written about, all about guns. He is also involved in many different programs to reduce gun violence. He was the Staff Attorney for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and now he is the Senior Staff Attorney there. He is also affiliated with Yale’s Law School and the History and Economics program at the University of Virginia. This makes him the right man to write this article and makes people want to read it because they know if will consist of the truth and only the truth, minimal bias, along with a persuading and well thought out argument.
Rostron uses a plethora of logical and ethical appeals throughout this piece. He made sure to back up his statements with facts or quotes like this one here when he was talking about the shooting at Virginia Tech, “After the shooting at Virginia Tech, the executive director of the Virginia Association of Chief of Police said: ‘I have my own concerns that, had there been a number of people who had been in that classroom with guns, there could have been additional persons killed just as a result of poor judgment calls.’” (Rostron 1) This is a great use of logical appeal because the whole paragraph talks about how handing teachers guns would make things worse because they might not always make the right calls under pressure, and that is exactly what this quote states. It makes the article that more reliable because the quote came from someone pretty high up at the time of the shooting, the Executive Director of the Virginia Chief of Police. There is many more like this but this one is the most significant. The more of these he uses the better because it makes the article more complete and shows how other people have the same view, not just Rostron. All throughout the article there is sophisticated words and sentence structure yet he does not over do it which reasurres the reader that the author knows what he is talking about. Rostron speaks in a tone that is passive yet forceful. Meaning, he is not yelling to get his point across. He is using words to imply he is calm, yet the words carry big meanings. They are small and seemingly meaningless words, but if you stop and think about some of them they have a hidden meaning. All this being said, he sometimes got confusing with what he was saying, like his words were too big or there were too many wow words in one sentence. This made it somewhat difficult to read because the reader is stopping every once and a while to try and decipher what a word meant. This is not the first time Rostron has written an article on gun violence, he has released many other articles on similar topics and has done multitudes of research on the situation, lending a hand in helping the reader believe what he is saying to be true, and looking to him as a credible author. Using logical appeals, he did a very great job in getting his point across. While he did not do bad at getting his point across using ethical appeals, his sentence structure could have been better and less confusing at times.
On top of his reputation, he uses emotional appeals on multiple occasions to try to get his point across effectively. The very first sentence is even an emotional appeal “As a society, do we really want our teachers to be prepared to shoot children, perhaps killing them?”(1) This will really speak to the heart to most people for two main reasons. First off, when parents read this the first thing they will think about is their kids being exposed to more guns. And what parent wants their kids around more guns than necessary? They will also think of a teacher possibly killing one of their own in defense of themselves or other students, whether it be by accident or if the child was actually threatening people. Either way, no parent wants that for their children so that pits them against teachers having guns right from the start of the article. Another thing parents may think of is the money aspect of teachers being given guns. This presents a whole other slew of problems. First, the guns and ammo would have to be bought, now that will either come out of the districts funds, which hurts education, or your parents will have to pay for them, when if you’re not financially able to do so you will run into an issue. Another problem that comes along with teachers being given guns is that most of them will not know how to properly handle and fire a gun, causing the firearm training to also come out of the parents pockets or school funds, which still does not help the children. Who knows; maybe it will even raise taxes! Emotional appeal is also present in this essay when another argument against schools arming teachers is revealed “Moreover, given the frequency with which innocent civilians are killed or injured in urban crossfire and slodriers are killed by friendly fire, it is equally plausible that creating a cross fire might cost additional lives”(1). This point will also touch a lot of people because maybe they had someone in the military or police force that was killed in friendly or cross fire and they know what it feels like. This is a very likely possibility since teachers, even though they have gone through all the training, will not be able to handle the pressure of being in a gun fight because they have most likely never been in one before. Also, hitting a moving target is a lot harder than hitting a paper target so they could very easily miss and hit a student of staff member behind the assailant. And that probably gets a lot of people thinking, do we really want teachers carrying guns when they could hurt our children just as easily as they could save them? I used to For those that are for teachers carrying guns, they may have been persuaded by this article because he has a valid point and has done a good job persuading the audience to at least rethink why they are for teachers carrying guns in school. He did a really good job, using the appeals mentioned above, creating an argument that was not only effective, but true.
Taking everything above into account: the writer’s reputation, the logical appeals, ethical appeals, and emotional appeals, Rostron did a very good job using the three appeals of argumentation to promote his stance on the matter. I believe that some people may even have been swayed by his compelling argument enough to where their opinions have shifted. The one downfall to Rostron’s article is that his ethical appeals were a little weak and made it tougher to understand the article. Overall, Rostron uses many appeals, along with his reputation to provide the reader with statistics to back up his reasoning and to show his knowledge on the topic to persuade readers that arming teachers is a bad idea in the fight against school violence.