Critical Thinking Essay
The acute issues of gun violence and the urging need for gun control have earned a great deal of public attention, often mixed with serious anxiety and concern. With the level of social tension concerning the staggering gun homicide rate rapidly growing, perspectives expressed by Wayne LaPierre and Mark Kelly demonstrate two different approaches of how to ensure people’s safety and guarantee their constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
Contemplating over the topic of Adam Lanza school massacre, LaPierre makes a number of very strong and persuasive arguments. First and foremost, he emphasizes that while trying to protect our possessions and material things, we have completely forgotten about children, whom we leave at school “utterly defenseless”. Secondly, he assumes that there are a lot of mentally sick people wandering outside and working out the blood shedding plan of school attack. Thirdly, he believes that gun abuse stems from society’s thoughtless attitude to violence in computer games and films that eventually promote social acceptance of gun assaults and murders. All things considered, he is convinced that schools must be guarded by armed “good guys”, as the weapon is the only means of standing against people who have neither value nor respect for children’s lives and wellbeing.
Kelly’s standpoint has offered some ample remarks on how legislature should be adapted to account for borderline cases of gun violence and, most importantly, prevent it. The speech given by the grief-stricken husband doesn’t sound as a lament of despair or unfairness; it fascinates with his sober-mindedness and sensible reasoning. Kelly makes it absolutely clear that he is “pro-gun ownership” and he finds it essential that the right for owning a gun is to be secured for every American citizen. He points out, however, that bearing a gun requires people to demonstrate awareness of their responsibility and, of course, act correspondingly to avoid the emergence of any dangerous situations in the case of their usage. His most relevant point covers ways of ensuring understanding of responsibility through thorough background checks, federal gun trafficking statute and public discussions of fire arms lethality.
In my opinion, LaPierre’s passionate manner of proving his standpoint as well as his argument on the necessity of stationing armed security officers in schools overweighs Kelly’s argument for establishing a legal framework to tackle the gun violence problem. On one hand, it seems quite reasonable why LaPierre blames people for foolishly guarding things or big people instead of their offspring, as the latter are the most precious gift given to any person (for example, President Obama revealed threatening implications of gun tragedies and is said to assign a few security guards at his daughters’ school). On the other hand, locating armed people at school would not seem appealing to many parents, since it would undermine the premise of peaceful and undisturbed atmosphere for children’s social development. What is more, with children learning about fire arms within easy reach, they might try to steal them and it would cause even more reasons to worry about children’s safety at schools. While the position LaPierre has taken is quite firm, Kelly would probably have responded that officers have to undergo thorough professional and psychological testing before going to school and detailed instructions for using a gun in the school area must be issued and strictly followed.
It is quite understandable that public disquietude arose as a result of natural fear for personal safety and an obvious fact that people have turned out to be dangerous to each other. In this light, fire arms is regarded as the one and only means to ensure personal protection from those who affected by mental derangement dare to kill innocent people. If people aren’t susceptible to the laws of logic or common sense, one is obliged to resort to the alternative of force, to which guns are a perfect match. The argument is definitely a contradictory one, since the consequences of applying force to people have to be reasonable and well-proved. I believe LaPierre would have approved of the statement, as it reflects some of his ideas of protection that doesn’t often take in account delicacy of social labeling. As for Kelly, I think he would have drawn attention to criteria we would use to check people’s sanity. He might also suggest that we clearly identify the types of guns that people are allowed to keep in possession.
