Comparing Adam Gopnik And Charles Cooke's Essay Shootings

Gun violence has been a massive issue through the modern age of humanity and has created a sense of division regarding the solution to this epidemic. In Adam Gopnik’s essay “Shootings”, Gopnik addresses the issue of gun violence and demands a change in American government policy to prevent the tragic killings of innocent lives. Gopnik harnesses the tool of emotion and passion to drive his essay. In Charles Cooke’s essay “Gun Control Dishonesty”, Cooke takes the polar opposite of Gopnik’s approach by utilizing factual evidence to prove the futility of gun control. Cooke’s essay overflows with logic and reason. He uses facts to debunk the fallacies of gun control while Gopnik chooses the power of emotion to fuel his essay. However, both authors

Gopnik starts his essay with a sobering reality of the horror and terror that followed the Virginia Tech shooting. He tells his audience, “To imagine the feelings of the police as they carried the bodies and heard the ringing [of the phones] is heartrending; to imagine the feelings of the parents who were calling —dread, desperate hope for a sudden answer and the bliss of reassurance, drawing grief— is unbearable” (Gopnik 694). Surprisingly, Gopnik uses emotion here to effectively recognize a severe problem in this modern age of history. He uses his word choices to pull his audience in to address the problem violence. His statement included words such as heartrending, dread, dawning grieve and desperate to persuade his readers into calling for the same change that he calls for: stricter gun laws. However, Gopnik’s immaturity is yet again revealed when he says, “The whole world saw that the United States has more gun violence than other countries because we have more guns and are willing to sell them to madmen who want to kill people” (Gopnik 695). Here again stands emotion, ineffective without logic to support it. Cooke recognizes the severity of the shootings such as Sandy Hook. He states, “That Sandy Hook involved little children made it that much harder to bear. But it did not change the salient fact: that massacres and private sales have pretty much nothing to do

Cooke’s voice becomes identifiable through statements such as “During the tantrum that he threw after the Toomey-Manchin bill had been defeated, President Obama mentioned ‘Sandy Hook’ four times,‘Newtown’ five times, and ‘children’ eight times… He brazenly connected his legislative efforts to ‘Tucson and Aurora and Chicago’” (Cooke 3). Cooke continues on to describe President Obama’s themes as “childish” (Cooke 3). These comments show Cooke’s distaste for President Obama’s efforts to create a gun-controlled country. Gopnik, on the other hand, utilizes his gift for sarcasm in his voice. Although his lack of facts and an overabundance of emotion covers his essay, his voice sells his point well. When describing the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shooting, he says, “But the parents, and the rest of us, were told that it was not the right moment to ask how the shooting happened — specifically, why an obviously disturbed student, with a history of mental illness, was able to buy guns whose essential purpose is to kill people — and why it happens over and over again in America (Gopnik 694). His sarcasm draws a laugh and also causes his readers to think his way. However, his voice remains entertaining until the second half of his essay where his charming sarcasm turns into an annoyance. He writes, “People talked about the shooting, of course, but much of the conversation was