Gun Control Is a Misfire Article Argumentative Essay I attached the instructions bellowthree body paragraph and introduction and conclusion UMKC – Writing

Gun Control Is a Misfire Article Argumentative Essay I attached the instructions bellowthree body paragraph and introduction and conclusion UMKC – Writing L4
Argumentative Essay
4/12/19
Argumentative Timeline
Step 1 – 2-3 printed articles attached. Write on the article in the top corner if you will use it for your
supporting reasons paragraph or your counterpoint paragraph.
Due: Tuesday, April 16
Points: 25
• Highlight the sections of the articles that you may use for your paraphrase (you do not have to
make a final decision at this point)
• Highlight the sections of the articles that you may use for your quote (you do not have to make
a final decision at this point)
Step 2 – Write Paragraph 1 of Body
Paragraph 1 of your body should be your first supporting reason for your argument. It should include a
paraphrase with an in-text citation. A Works Cited page is also due with the article cited in the correct
MLA format.
Due: Thursday April 18
Points: 15
Step 3 – Write Paragraph 2 of Body
Paragraph 2 of your body should be your second supporting reason for your argument. It should include
a quote with an in-text citation. A Works Cited page is also due with the article cited in the correct MLA
format.
Due: Wednesday, April 24
Points 15
Step 4 – Write Paragraph 3 of – Counterargumentative
Paragraph 3 of your body should be your counterargumentative paragraph. This should include a
paraphrase and a quote with in-text citations. . A Works Cited page is also due with the article cited in
the correct MLA format
Due: Friday, April 26
Points 15
Entire Essay Due: Wednesday May 1
Points 100
Cover
Gun Control Is a Misfire
What liberals and the NRA both get wrong.
by Marc Cooper
T
he most fervent and polarized sides in the renewed debate on gun control share one piece
of solid common ground: they both invest
rather magical qualities in the cold, lifeless
hardware of guns themselves.
For liberals, the very term “gun violence” has been
reified into some sort of natural force, completely
detached from any identifiable root causes other than
guns themselves—as if .45 semi-automatics, Bushmaster black rifles, and high-capacity magazines exert
some hypnotic gravitational pull that beckons latent
maniacs to pick them up and spray innocent crowds
with military-like barrages.
On the other side, hardcore NRA supporters and
certain other Second Amendment support groups define guns and weaponry as not just the symbolic but
also the highest material expression of liberty, freedom,
and moral rectitude. Anybody who can buy and possess
a gun, especially if he or she conceals it—or even open
carries—in public, automatically passes into the ranks of
being a “good guy.” No matter what this new hero’s background, inclinations, or emotional make-up might be.
Now it seems this sterile debate is destined to become
a wedge issue once more. So it was in the early ’90s,
thanks to an aggressive push by the NRA. This time
around, however, Democrats are flogging the issue and
taking the initiative.
It’s a rather radical departure for liberals. Many a
Democratic operative was convinced that the Gingrich
Congress, with high-caliber NRA funding, swept in as a
snapback to the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban championed
by California’s Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein
and backed by the Clinton White House. And when
Al Gore could not carry his own state of Tennessee in
2000—which would have put him over the top regardless
12
T H E A M E R I C A N C O N S E R VA T I V E
of Florida’s Hurricane Chad—those same party insiders
were further convinced that gun control was the culprit.
With Democrats and liberals persuaded that the issue had become politically radioactive, they dropped
gun control like a red-hot rifle barrel. Indeed, during
the 2008 presidential primary cycle, the Democratic
National Committee issued a statement slapping Republican candidate Mitt Romney for having supported
gun control while governor of Massachusetts. “Either
Mitt Romney’s brand new NRA lifetime membership
card wasn’t activated in time to get him into the convention or Romney was afraid he wouldn’t be able to
smooth talk his way out of his record on gun issues,”
wrote DNC spokesman Damien LaVera.
During his first term in office, the only action that
Barack Obama took on the issue was to liberalize the
possession of guns in national parks and wildlife refuges. Yet liberals have now done another about-face. At
the beginning of this year, on the heels of a high-profile
shooting on an Oregon college campus that took nine
lives, a teary-eyed president went on national TV to
announce some small-scale tweaks in ATF regulations
saying, “as I said just a few months ago, and I said a few
months before that, and I said each time we see one of
these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not
enough. It’s not enough.”
Denunciations of a rampant “gun violence epidemic” and “mass shootings” have become leading liberal
campaign tropes. For Hillary Clinton, her opponent
Bernie Sanders’s D-minus rating from the NRA is not
good enough.
Marc Cooper has reported on politics and culture for more than
40 years. A contributing editor to The Nation, he retired recently
from the journalism faculty at the USC Annenberg School.
MARCH/APRIL 2016
Mega-billionaire and former New York mayor Michael
Bloomberg has poured millions into gun-control organizations, many of them brandishing filed-down, softsounding names like “Everytown Against Gun Violence”
and “Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.”
The words “gun control” have been replaced with what
seem to be focus-group-tested euphemisms like “sensible gun reform,” “common sense gun safety reform,” and
now the ubiquitous “opposition to gun violence.”
The web fills up daily with liberal memes about a
“Florida man” or some other poor soul shooting himself accidentally or getting shot by his toddler, creating
the impression that in this nation of 320 million people
such incidents are now as prevalent as the common
cold—or at least more common than people showing
up in the ER to have sex-related gadgets removed from
this or that orifice.
In the aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings
late last year, MSNBC’s talking head Rachel Maddow,
along with other liberal outlets like Vox, stoked the fires
of the renewed and rebranded gun-control movement
by quoting a spurious Washington Post claim that in
2015 America was bloodied by a staggering 355 mass
shootings.
No matter that Mark Follman, keeper of a database
on shootings in America for the decidedly left-of-center
and adamantly anti-NRA Mother Jones, debunked this
hysteria in the New York Times, saying there had been, in
fact, only four mass killings in 2015—consistent, more
or less, with the tallies of the previous 30 years. “[A]s
those numbers gain traction in the news media,” Follmer
wrote, referring to the preposterous figure of nearly one
mass shooting per day, “they distort our understanding.”
Follman’s quest to remain clear-headed on the matter—instead of joining in the growing demagogy that
suggests going to the movies in America today resembles something like being in the infantry defending Fallujah—leaves him in a fairly rarified minority, at least
on the liberal left.
The renewed push for more gun control—or against
“gun violence” if you prefer—should be fully understandable. The blood-soaked media spectacles of the
Gabby Giffords shooting, the massacres in Aurora and
Charleston, and the thought of 20 small children and
six adults gunned down in Newtown very well should
produce an emotional shock and urge “to do something.” For Democrats, however, these incidents urged
them to cynically reload the gun-control issue and offer
a number of mostly useless proposals that will do nothing to reduce gun murders.
Most of the underpinnings of “gun violence” reforms are based on skewed assumptions, mixed with a
sometimes shocking dose of ignorance on the part of
MARCH/APRIL 2016
policymakers, re-enforced by a media class that cannot
often tell one end of a gun from the other. The rhetoric
of the movement also continues to stigmatize just about
anybody who owns a gun as a knuckle-dragging supporter of fringe militias. Worse, at least from my perspective, the current gun-control strategy also plays directly
into the hands of an NRA that is, in fact, more a lobbying
group for the gun industry than for gun owners.
Liberals also now recur to the scourge of “gun violence” as a convenient way to betray their own historic
commitment to greater social justice. No longer do
they need to tackle such daunting issues as urban decay, low wages, and poor education because they prefer
to reverse cause and effect: if we could only get rid of
guns… It’s become a catchall mantra for the disorder
of too many urban centers and the marginalization of
their inhabitants, who are the ones doing most of the
dying—and most of the killing.
Some personal disclosure is in order. My rap against
the majority of gun-control activists does not stem from
an absolutist Second Amendment position. I think
there are some rational and bold legislative steps that
should be enacted to reduce all social violence, including that from a barrel of a gun. Like most rational people, yes, I oppose innocent people dying from gunshots.
Politically, I might be defined as a libertarian leftist—
definitely a leftist. I am also a gun owner and a member
in good standing of the (small) Liberal Gun Club. I own
10 guns, including a legal AK-47, incorrectly vilified as
an “assault rifle.” And I reload my own ammo.
I would love to see an honest debate on guns in
American life. But I refuse to support what has essentially become one more distracting, off-point skirmish
in the culture wars. There is very little seriousness and a
whole lot of cultural red meat in the reborn Democratic
push against “gun violence.” It is fashioned much more
to buck up partisan electoral support in swing suburban districts and among minority voters than to reduce
the abuse of guns. To “oppose gun violence” or to argue
for “common sense gun safety,” even without knowing
anything about the issue, merely imbues rank-and-file
liberals with a warm, fuzzy sense of moral superiority.
Likewise, a fiction has been born that all gun owners are an identifiable and unique species dominated
by chubby white men enthralled by Rush Limbaugh,
militias, and a desire to shoot it out with jackbooted
Feds. Gun owners in reality defy pigeonholing as “gun
nuts” or “gunners,” and whenever I go target shooting
at my local Los Angeles range I find a crowd who by
age, race, and apparent social background are wildly
more diverse than the University of Southern California journalism school faculty from which I recently
retired.
T H E A M E R I C A N C O N S E R VA T I V E
13
Cover
Gun ownership in the U.S.
= 1 million
There are over 309 million people living in the United States (2010 census)
There are some 300 million guns in the
United States and they are not going
anywhere anytime soon.
Thanks to pernicious legislation sponsored by the NRA, firearms research in
the United States is full of roadblocks.
So nobody really knows how many guns
there are in America. A 2012 Congressional Research Service report estimated that in 2009 there were 310 million
firearms: “114 million handguns, 110
million rifles, and 86 million shotguns.”
Other more recent estimates put the figure between 245 million or 360 million.
The precise figure means little. One
way or another there is “easy access” to
guns. And as firearms tend to survive
and function for many, many decades,
A 2012 Congressional Research Service report estimated that in 2009 there
there can be absolutely no discussion of
were 310 million firearms in the United States: 114 million handguns, 110 million
gun control without accepting this simrifles, and 86 million shotguns.
ple, cold reality.
I am not interested in any discussion
of what the Second Amendment really
means, nor am I much interested in any
moral discourse either way on guns. I
am not, simply, because the horse left
the barn a very long time ago and those
guns are here to stay. No buyback program, no further restriction laws, no
weapons bans are going to make any
visible difference. Any control measure
that does not start from this reality is
about as realistic as signing a petition
against earthquakes.
The only concrete achievement of the
gun-control movement has been to genMichael Hogue
erate an ever-increasing amount of gun
sales. And many advocates are not honOn a very personal basis, I will confess, I am now est in declaring their underlying motivation.
Gun-control activists need not take my word for
tired of and deeply annoyed by affluent liberals—living in 6,000-square-foot houses with heated swimming it that their strategy has been a rank failure. In 2015,
pools, who use a 400-horsepower SUV to drive their the FBI processed a record number of firearms backkids two blocks to school, with a family carbon foot- ground checks: more than 23 million requests were
print that of a small battleship—asking me sharply, “So handled by the National Instant Background Check
why do you need so many guns?” or “Why on earth do System. Again, there is no certainty, but it is estimated
that only 1 percent or maybe 2 percent of those checks
you need such a powerful rifle?”
Getting to a rational position on guns and gun con- come back negative, meaning that at least 20 million
trol, however, now requires conjoining a number of new guns were put into circulation just last year.
This trend has been building historically. If the goal
hard facts and shooting down a bevy of shibboleths
kept alive and energized by liberal ignorance. It re- of gun-control advocates has been to reduce what’s
quires anything but an emotion-driven lashing out at called easy access to guns, they have totally failed—if
not been running the wrong way down the field.
strawmen.
14
T H E A M E R I C A N C O N S E R VA T I V E
MARCH/APRIL 2016
Yes, the NRA’s constant drumbeating about “gun mean that gun makers could be sued for engaging in
grabbers” and real or imagined fears about terrorist truth-in-advertising, i.e., for selling ostensibly lethal
attacks help fuel the binge buying. Yet while the NRA weapons that actually are lethal. In what sort of logic
clearly exaggerates the threat of gun confiscation, con- is that not advocating the shutdown of the industry?
trol advocates lay the groundwork by focusing their ef- (Sanders, by the way, under pressure from Clinton’s atforts far too much on the gear—the guns—instead of tacks and much of his own progressive base, reversed
the people who use them.
his position before the Iowa caucuses and is now supFurther, count me among those who suspect the real porting a bill that would weaken that immunity.)
motives of many of those who try to soft-sell control
with the new euphemisms of “gun safety reform” and Gun homicides are on a historic decline and are not
“sensible gun reform.” There is no way to substantiate a growing epidemic.
my guess scientifically, but having spent my adult life in
a primarily “progressive” and “liberal” milieu it is rather
The round-the-clock coverage given to the handobvious to me that many, if not most, urban middle- ful of outright gun massacres by tabloid outlets like
class liberals who do not own guns actually hate guns. CNN creates the sensation that firearms homicides
That is their understandable right. But just underneath are a rapidly multiplying American epidemic. The
their mumbo-jumbo rhetoric about “gun safety” lurks reality is quite different, if not the opposite.
a desire to somehow magically do away with, ban, or
According to data from the Centers for Disease
confiscate guns and repeal the Second Amendment.
Control and Prevention analyzed by the nonpartiLook no further than Hillary Clinton’s campaign san Pew Research Center, gun deaths have been in
slam on Bernie Sanders for having voted for the 2005 general decline for more than 20 years, down some
law that granted gun manufacturers heavy layers of 31 percent since 1993. Between 1993 and 2000 the
protection against legal liability claims. Said Clinton re- tally was down a full 50 percent, even as gun sales
cently: “So far as I know, the gun industry and gun sell- increased. Since 2000 the gun murder rate has more
ers are the only business in America that is totally free or less stabilized, showing only marginal variation
of liability for their behavior. Nobody else is given that up or down year to year.
immunity. And that just illustrates the extremism that Gun violence has declined since 1990s
has taken over this debate.”
Deaths by firearm per 100,000 people, all ages
As NPR Fact Check
pointed out, that’s not 100 16
15.2
percent true. Clinton’s statement “doesn’t appear to be 14
completely accurate,” Adam
Winkler, professor of law at 12
UCLA and author of GunTotal
10.5
fight: The Battle Over the
Right to Bear Arms in Amer- 10
ica, told NPR. “The 2005 law
7.3
does not prevent gun mak8
6.7
ers from being held liable for
Suicide
defects in their design. Like
6
car makers, gun makers can
7.0
be sued for selling a defec4
tive product. The problem is
Homicide
that gun violence victims of3.4
ten want to hold gun makers
2
liable for the criminal misuse of a properly function0
ing product.”
1993
1997
2001
2005
2009
2014
If Clinton’s stated desire
Note: Total gun deaths include police and accidental shootings and shooting deaths of undetermined intent,
to overturn that law were
which are not counted as homicides or suicides. SOURCE: Pew Research Center; CDC’s National Center for
Injury Prevention and Control.
fulfilled, it would obviously
MARCH/APRIL 2016
T H E A M E R I C A N C O N S E R VA T I V E
15
Cover
About 11,000 Americans every year are shot to
death when someone else pulls the trigger. Twice
that number commit suicide by gun. Let’s repeat that
fact: two-thirds of American gun violence is deliberately self-inflicted, and while certainly lamentable
represents no public safety threat—unless you are
among those committing suicide.
Gun suicides since 2010, in fact, have ticked
slightly upward. Would any gun control measure
slow down the suicide rate? I have no idea, nor does
anybody else. I would have to assume not, just as
prohibiting alcohol did nothing to diminish alcoholism. (But it sure did fuel armed gang warfare by
bootleggers.)
The Pew study also found, to nobody’s surprise,
that in spite of the falloff in gun deaths, a full 56 percent of Americans thought that gun-related killings
had actually increased over the last 20 years.
As to “gun safety”—the new catchword for gun
control—the grand total of accidental gun deaths
in the U.S. hovers at about 500 per year. Even strict
gun-control advocates put the number no higher
than 600.
It’s never comfortable playing the atrocity game of
comparing death tolls, but it’s necessary when fashioning public-policy priorities: notably, the CDC calculates that 75,000 Americans die each year of HA-I,
or Healthcare Associated Infections, a fancy term for
the deaths of otherwise nonterminal patient caused
by lethal bacteria in hospitals. Perhaps a campaign
advocating “Health Care Safety Reform” is in order?
Mass killings are not the biggest gun problem we
face. And gun death is not an equal-opportunity
offender.
The single greatest inconvenient truth in the totality of the gun issue is that mass killings of the sort
carried out in Roseburg, Oregon or Newtown, Connecticut are absolute outliers. These sorts of atrocities account for far less than 1 percent of American
gun deaths. And a majority of these killings employed legally purchased weapons.
These are also acts carried out by clearly mentally ill subjects. Is it cruel, insensitive, or cynical to
say that probably nothing could prevent such massacres? No. Even in highly authoritarian states lik…
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