Rhetorical Analysis Of Barack Obama's Speech

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On January 5th, 2016 The United States President, Barack Obama, gave a speech to the United States from the White House on an ongoing issue of gun violence. This speech on gun violence was broadcasted on news channels across the board. President Obama portrayed many different speech tactics aimed at the greater goal of keeping guns out of the hands of wrongful owners. President Obama presented his views on gun violence to the American people by utilizing emotional appeal throughout the speech, introducing a well thought out executive plan, and backing his conclusions up through ongoing statistical evidence. The first tactic I will present is President Obama’s use of emotional appeal. Throughout the entire speech Obama mentioned many touching …show more content…

During the speech the President made many bold claims. In his favor, he also had many statistics to back his claims up. At the beginning of the speech Obama used a statistical tactic by numbering the past gun violence instances by saying, “Fort Hood, Binghamton, Aurora, Oak Creek, Newtown, The Navy Yard, Santa Barbara, Charleston, San Bernardino; too many”. Many in attendance of the speech then responded to this statement by saying, “too many”. Nine minutes in the speech the President stated an unfortunate stat that thirty thousand Americans have had their lives cut short by guns. While presenting his new plan he stated that one in thirty online gun shoppers in a particular instance who were buying deadly weapons also had lengthy criminal histories. This stat supported his request of mandatory background checks. Obamas final stat was solely based on criminals saying that “Twenty-six Americans, twenty whom were children lost their lives at Sandy Hook.” Obama then concluded his speech by a statistic not coming from criminals but from personal suicides stating that two out of three lives lost from gun violence are suicides. Thanks in part to statistical claims Obama could back up his strong opinion based statements and fluently deliver his

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