Michelle Gonzalez Basin
Mr. Otto Zequeira
AS Thinking Skills
January 8th, 2019
Independent Writing
Do you own a gun? Guns have been around since 1364 and have been used for either protection, war, or even as a collection. Recently, a rapid increase has occurred in the amount of people who own or use guns. This has led to various injuries and even teen suicide. Now more than ever, there have been debates on whether we as a country, should increase gun control. The New York Times wrote an article on how necessary gun control is and on how lethal guns really are. This article is making people aware that this is a present problem that is affecting thousands of people world wide. The New York Times article is structured logically due to the use of data and statistics to back up all the claims, uses real life examples to show the drastic increase in gun deaths, and lastly, the usage of specialists to make the article and the author more reliable. We have a chance to stop all these deaths, uncertainties, and fears, but we have to act now before it’s too late to fix this problem. What do you think? Can we decrease the amount of gun deaths if we work together? Or will our human insecurities and selfishness get the better of us?
First of all, the article is structured logically because it uses data, real life experiences, and specialists, which all make the article dependable and flow better. The main claim of the article was that deaths by guns has drastically increased through these recent years and this shows some concerning underlying issues. “When adjusted for population size, the rate of gun deaths in 2017 also increased slightly to 12 deaths for every 100,000 people, up from 11.8 per 100,000 in 2016. By this measure, last year had the highest rate of firearm deaths since the mid-1990s, the data showed.” As more people own guns, the more people start to panic. Not only are people scared that these guns will reach anyone’s hands, but also that kids these days aren’t as safe as they use to. One rash decision can be the difference between life and death, essence and fatality. These statistics show that these deaths won’t just lower by themselves, they will keep on increasing. If we don’t take action, then who will? People now and days undermine how severe our behaviors have on others. We do not just take our lives but we also take in the lives of people who care about us. ““It is significant that after a period of relative stability, now the rates are rising again,” Bob Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the C.D.C.’s National Center for Health Statistics, said in a phone interview.” This text shows how concerned specialists and scientists are with this sudden increase in mortality rates due to guns. There is no more ignoring and pushing aside the problem because now this has affected the whole world, people of all ages, genders, and ethnicities. When is it enough? When will a stand be taken? Are we already too late or is there st...
