Rhetorical Analysis on article "Why Our Campuses Are Safer Without Concealed Handguns"

Rhetorical Analysis Paper In the essay we read, entitled “Why Our Campuses Are Safer Without Concealed Handguns”, we see the author use five main points, as well as using appeals to Ethos Logos and Pathos to help reinforce his view on the topic. The five main reasons that the author feels that college campuses are safer without concealed handguns are introduced to us in the opening of the article, listed as bullet points. The author then goes on to break the article into these separate sections to allow him to go more in depth and explain his position. In this way, he appeals to the reader’s sense of Ethos throughout the entire article by convincing us that he knows what he is taking about. However, the author does not stop here. The author uses an appeal to Ethos a couple more times throughout the article, one of the most obvious is in the section where he makes the point that “concealed carry permit holders are not always ‘law-abiding’ citizens”. The author continues in this section to write about how easy it is for certain people to obtain firearms and concealed carry licenses, even though they should not be allowed to legally. The author blames this problem on a series of systems that are in place, that are nowhere near enough, putting the blame being on communication, or lack-there-of, between states and the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). The author then uses examples of how state governments often simply do not submit pertinent records to databases such as NICS. This can result in convicted felons and mentally ill persons having the ability to purchase a firearm or receive a concealed carry permit, which we have seen can lead to very bad results. In the same way that the author uses Ethos throughout the article, he also appeals strongly to the reader’s sense of Logos, or logic. The main reason for this is because he must back up his strong opinions with logic and statistics to support what he is writing. This is shown easily