Rhetorical Analysis Of Our Blind Spot About Guns, By Nicholas Kristof

In his article “Our Blind Spot about Guns,” Nicholas Kristof argues for making guns safer for the people who use them by bringing up the comparison of guns to cars; “Cars don’t kill people. People kill people,” (261). Kristof’s purpose is to address the fact that guns are not as safe as they should be and are the cause of thousands of deaths each year. Although his ideas for increasing gun safety are interesting, there is a shortcoming in the comparisons he used. In order to make a stronger argument, one must use literary devices. In this case, Kristof used ethos, pathos, logos, and additional rhetorical devices.

Kristof uses Antanaclasis or the repetition of words or phrases using a play on words: “This saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year and is a model of

One of his strengths was the use of rhetorical devices to address his arguments, but the weakness of this was that he had flawed

Rodriguez 3 comparisons. He brought up very interesting ways to regulate guns and make them safer, but they would not be as effective as one might think. Just that now is too late for these gun regulations to function properly. He said that the steps he gave won’t eliminate gun deaths but certainly will decrease the amount of deaths as much as a seat belt does to people on cars (164).

In conclusion, Kristof’s arguments had flawed ideas about regulating guns because as we have seen before, a background check will not stop a man from shooting his entire family, and a gun lock will not stop a terrorist from shooting innocent people. As was said in this writing, his comparison of a gun to a car was flawed in the way that a gun has much more power over man than a car does. Vehicles were invented for transportation over long distances, while a gun was made for killing. This doesn’t compare to a vehicle in any