One of Tao’s claims in his paper is that people use guns for purely pragmatic reasons. According to Tao, people who carry guns never use them for ill intentions. According to Tao “many individuals in the United States own and carry a firearm for purely pragmatic reasons. This claim that Tao places on the opening of his article is purely an assumption that has no statistical evidence to back it up. Many crimes have been committed in the United States, including school shootings involving guns. Shooting innocent students does not count as a pragmatic act. Instead, it is a severe crime against humanity. People who carry out such crimes are American citizens who have guns in their custody. However, according to Tao, everyone with a gun uses it for reasonable reasons. This claim fails to convince people who have been either direct or indirect victims of crimes involving guns to support the idea of everyone being allowed to own guns in the USA. Such people may stop reading Tao’s article as soon as they stumble on such a claim.
Tao’s article targets people who support the gun control act. First, he wrote the article in May 2020 after extreme leftists placed a gun control bill on the Congress table to challenge the second Amendment. Tao was trying to convince his audience why they should not pass the bill into law. His main aim is to convince the audience that owning a gun is essential in a world full of uncertainty and scarcity, as his topic reads. Furthermore, Tao notes that “this sobering pill can be difficult for many people to swallow but that’s reality”. The only people who can find it hard to accept that people need to carry guns because “carrying a cop is too heavy” are people who believe that it is only the police that carries guns to protect the people and not the other way round. This claim can somehow catch the audience’s attention because Tao acknowledges their feeling.
Although Tao used a misconception at first, he added credibility to his work by using facts backed up by statistics. Tao notes that “in the United States, depending where you live, police response time ranges from nine minutes to over an hour”. He supports his claim by saying that at the moment, most police were affected by COVID-19, and they were off duty. Such claims give a clear picture of how the police department is understaffed and cannot provide sufficient security to American citizens. To further support how the police cannot be counted on for providing the needed protection, he notes that the police are no longer allowed to handle burglary, break-ins, and theft cases. This use of ethos helps Tao connect with his audience because some of them might have been victims of police failure.
People in the United States have been victims of insecurity cases to the extent that some have been injured, lost their loved ones, or lost their valuable properties under the hands of criminals. Tao uses this fact to convince his audience that such cases have always been there and that they continue to increase with time to the degree that everyone needs to take responsibility for their security. For instance, Tao uses John Locke who “described the right of self-preservation as a “fundamental law of nature” in his Second Treatise of Civil Government”. This way, he uses a historical event of an expert to show that the need for self-protection has been essential for a long time. Such remarks educate his audience, young and old, that history has proved that insecurity has always been there and will always happen. Therefore, combating crime is impossible, and the only solution is for people to carry guns for self-defense. Such backed-up claims do not warrant an adverse reaction from the audience because Tao uses statistical and historical facts.
Tao uses both facts and personal assumptions in this work to support the fact that owning a gun is a necessity in the current world. He notes that people only use the firearms they own for pragmatic reasons, which is a mere assumption. Tao does not back up this claim with facts that would convince his audience that having a gun is a good thing. However, he also uses some facts and statistics in his paper to show that besides his assumptions, he has studied his topic, and the information he is sharing is credible and essential to shaping the decisions of American citizens and policymakers. He also uses the past to show American’s that guns do not have to be dangerous, but they can be used well to provide security and to rebuild the safety of Americans.
Works Cited
Tao, Aaron. “Why Gun Rights Are Essential In a World of Uncertainty and Scarcity.” Google Docs, 2020, docs.google.com/document/d/1_uAL061_l1taff5cNc3EvH8vAJb5P5QkcdeRa62amAw/edit#.
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