Threshold Of Violence Gladwell Analysis

“Thresholds of Violence” is an article featured on The New Yorker written by Malcolm Gladwell. The article is written in regards to a young man, John LaDue, who has been arrested on several accounts which center around a planned attack on his high school. Gladwell utilizes LaDue as an example to portray the rising concern about gun violence in schools today. Gladwell is attempting to represent the minimal impact a person’s mental state and history has on his ability to commit heinous crimes such as partaking in school shootings. He indicates no clear audience but, is speaking to the population of America as a whole. His argument is extremely effective through his manipulation of context and Aristotle’s Appeal logos. Context is the number
Gladwell utilizes Granovetter’s threshold model as a way to enforce the idea that people are more willing to commit acts of crime when someone before them has committed the crime. The theory proclaims that people have a threshold for violence and the lowest threshold is able to commit a crime with no influence while each threshold above him requires an increased amount of pressure to commit said act. Furthermore, the psychologists who interviewed LaDue also supported this idea by concluding LaDue was actually on the autism spectrum and not psychotic or corrupt. He was simply an innocent child who was “just a little off” and was unable to express his emotions in a socially acceptable manner. The police report also exemplifies this idea by portraying LaDue as someone who was crying out for help and actually desired a psychological analysis but, did not know how to go about asking for one. Both of these examples enforce the idea of innocent people following a crowd because this is what they believe is now socially acceptable in certain groups of people. Gladwell manipulates this information to support his claims about gun violence becoming a chain reaction rather than something only mentally corrupt people are capable of. Therefore, Gladwell’s defense on the reason for a growth in school shootings is a strong argument because of the time period it is written in and the logistics he uses to support his argument. School shootings have recently become a problem which everyone should be concerned about and Gladwell has the research to tell American’s why it may be