The following video is an Action Project from my Rhetoric course, From the section 1, “Suppose”. It is a speech in which I have to set myself as a candidate for president, and talk about a major issue in the current presidential race. I chose to explore whether there should be more restrictions on the current process of buying a firearm. After listening to some podcasts and doing some more research on the web, I realized the complexity of this problem and the great division that it creates in the USA. This speech is based on the point of view that I have decided to take.
Here is the script:
Good evening fellow patriots, journalists, and to all of America. Before me I have an issue which is more alive and consuming now than ever, a debate that remains controversial after almost 30 years. The question that has been set is this: Should there be more restrictions on the current process of purchasing a gun? In order to discuss this question, there is a series of facts worth mentioning to put us all on the same page.
According to studies, (and I quote) “It has been estimated that U.S. civilians own 270 to 310 million firearms, and that 37 to 42% of the households in the country have at least one gun.” There is a number that is used commonly in the media to estimate the amount of people that have used guns for protection within this last year: 2.5 million people. Now the question is whether we can trust this number. The person responsible for this statistic is a Professor of Criminology at the University of Florida, professor Gary Klerk. His investigation was built on interviewing 5,000 people, and based on the answers of this question he realized that 66 of these 5 thousand people said that they had used a gun for defense over the last year. Thus, he extrapolated this number by the whole population of our country. It is important to see that 5 thousand people is about 1% of our entire population. Clearly this number has no validity. However there is a number not so usually used by the media that comes from the National Crime Victimization Survey. This survey interviewed 90 thousand people, and arrived at the conclusion that there is about a total of 100 thousand defensive gun uses in America per year. By this I mean that the amount of people that actually use guns for protective use is something very close to 100,000 thousand, and not 2.5 million. Of course, the bigger the number of people you work in your survey is, the more credible it gets to be.
Another thing that I believe all of us must have clear is the fact that by viewing this survey, we realize that from all of the people that said that they had used guns for protection, more than 80% also said that they were the only ones in the situation with a gun. The great majority of times that patriots use guns to protect themselves, it is not to fight off someone with another gun, but rather to fight someone off only. Comparing all of these facts with all of the thousands of cases that we see of kids and teenagers being affected and killed by firearms each year, I stand in the position of enforcing these laws and restrictions. I would like to make clear that even though I want to do all that is in my power to prevent mass shootings, my view is mostly concerned in the everyday lives of people. I recently traveled to the cities of Chicago and Philadelphia, and the stories that I heard when there were simply excruciating. The amount of youth and children that suffer from this problem in these cities and in all of America in general is everyday rising, the amount of suicides in general are rising, all of this from the lack of restrictions to buy a gun. Hearing from the people themselves that you could buy a piece for no more than $30, Why not buy a gun? I feel that this fire must be extinguished. It must be extinguished Now. For these reasons, ladies and gentlemen, I support the movement of firearm purchase restrictions for the country, and hereby I promise that I will do everything that is in my hands to implement it.
Thank you very much.
SOURCES
- “It has been estimated that U.S. civilians own 270 to 310 million firearms, and that 37 to 42% of the households in the country have at least one gun.” - Wikipedia. https://www.wikipedia.org/
