2/20/14
Gun Shows
The scholarly article “Gun Shows and Gun Violence: Fatally Flawed Study Yields Misleading Results” first appeared in the magazine American Journal of Public Health in 2010. It was co-written by Garen Wintemute, David Hemenway, Daniel Webster, Glenn Pierce, and Anthony Braga. In their Journal entry they aim to convince their readers that the widely publicized case study “The Effect of Gun Shows on Gun-Related Deaths: Evidence from California and Texas” is a bunch of nonsense. “We believe the study is fatally flawed”. Toulmin’s Model, along with the three appeals to argument, are techniques frequently applied by the authors used to create their convincing argument. Right out of the gates the …show more content…
“We believe that the study discussed in the working paper contains serious errors in design and execution that fatally compromise its findings”. Now there warrant is pretty self-explanatory but the emotional appeal is first revealed. By using the works “serious errors” and “fatally” the authors begin to create a sense of emotion. At least from my point of view I think the authors did this well. When I read that it kind of makes me think: Dang. False case studies like these are the reasons we have poor gun control laws. Poor gun control laws lead to deaths of many innocent people. This starts to get the reader emotionally involved. Making them somewhat “despise” the researchers. “This paper, although NOT published in a peer-reviewed publication, has nonetheless become influential in the continuing debate about how to best regulate gun shows and gun commerce to prevent gun violence.” …show more content…
They aren’t saying that gun shows are the cause for all deaths on earth. They are reasonable with their points. Some evidence “Although (gun shows) are a source of guns used in crime, gun shows are just 1 of the venues that supply firearms for criminal use on a more-or-less continuing basis.” This gives the reader a sense of comfort. These authors aren’t just trying over react about guns shows, but they have a point. They also use some of Toulmin’s structural techniques. Throughout the article they are mostly referring to homicides. In the beginning they challenge that rebuttal. They let us know that their comments on the findings largely confine to homicide, but they have “similar concerns about the study’s finding for suicide” Now this isn’t a very convincing sentence. Although homicides are violent just like suicides, it doesn’t really prove to us that they are as knowledgably about suicides, and the fact that they use both terms to add validity to their findings can be