Private Guns, Public Health by David Hemenway
Examines several historical and modern components of the use of guns in self-defense and other potential violent situations. As Richard North Patterson, an American novelist and active member of pro-peace and anti-violence groups, states, “”This lucid and penetrating study is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the tragedy of gun violence in America and-even more important-what we can do to stop it. David Hemenway cuts through the cant and rhetoric in a way that no fair-minded person can dismiss, and no sane society can afford to ignore” (Project Muse).
Unfortunately, I felt the need to disregard all statistics that were taken before 2000, but that still left a solid resource. Hemenway touches upon areas of the debate including deaths related to gun violence, the demographics of gun violence, the effect of the location in question, the supply of guns, and potential policy actions. For this week, we chose to focus on the self-defense and behavioral issues.
The Self-Defense Self-Delusion by Steve Rendall at FAIR
This resource is a collection of data utilized to dispute and clarify statistics from other websites. Many of these statements disprove claims from the “gun lobby’s arsenal of propaganda”. The article itself covers a wide variety of content that is best used to pick and choose for the sake of counterarguments.
Examples of useful statistics from the source include the frequency of gun use in burglaries and burglary defense, the numbers of individuals killed by gun violence, and the 20/20 report where college students were trained with guns and failed in simulations. As I said before, this source is scattered and doesn’t follow a consistent thought as it deals with a variety of misinformation from other sources.
The Case for Gun Rights is Stronger than you Think by William J. Bennett
In our refutation, we utilize an article on CNN that states that guns should be available in schools for the purpose of self-defense. The article provides numerous emotional appeals that reference recent school shootings that we all remember, but there is also a lot of conjecture, assumptions, and “use of common sense”. Despite that, the article is well-written and articulate, and deserves to be in the conversation.
This article does add a facet to the debate, and that is the safety in schools. While we can debate gun use in cities or in homes, an increasing concern is arising from recent events that involve children in school settings. In the future, our group will surely look further into school examples, hopefully drawing more conclusions than the “what-ifs” that Benett proposes in his article.
COMM230 - Gun Ban 