Rhetorical Strategies For Gun Ownership

Gun owners throughout the United States are bound together by their ownership of a firearm(s), resulting in a, more-or-less, “community” of people with common characteristics. This being the possession of a gun. The article, “Gun demanding: the psychology of why people want firearm”, brings insight into the mind of a gun owner, such as the people within one's immediate family, or oneself. The Guardian, the news outlet that published the article, carries a very unfavorable view of gun ownership throughout the column, to say the least. Regardless, the rhetor, Dean Burnett, uses a wide range of rhetorical strategies such as logos, rhetorical questions, and tone, just to name a few, to enhance his article and give some credibility to the statements

The use of this rhetorical strategy is meant to mock owners of such guns saying that gun owners are really just paranoid and have succumbed to social pressure; they don't really need these objects, they just want them. People from all walks of life don't see owning these objects as something they want, but as something they need for protection, along with the fact that people who don’t own a gun currently aren't entirely opposed to owning one in the future. Actually over half, 52%, of all non-gun owners say they are open to owning a gun some point in the near or further future. This shows that it is not “social pressure” making gun owners continue to keep their firearms, rather they would want to continue protecting their families and that other people are seeing that as a viable option for themselves. If anything, in the current political climate we are in today, there would be much more social pressure for one not to own a gun than there would be to continue owning one. The stigma around guns still exists today that one only wants a gun to show off and go hunting and promote one's “toxic masculinity” as the article so gracefully puts. Nonetheless, the rhetorical questions the rhetor uses would be effective to someone on the more liberal side of the aisle to continue and promote their specific ideology about who uses guns and