Persuasive Speech

I haven’t been here for a few weeks, the first week was because of a business trip, the second spring break and the third my son was in the hospital, but last week I missed class because I chose to re-write my speech. I felt that my topic being what it is I couldn’t talk about it without mentioning let alone centering my speech around the Virginia tech incident.

This is an copy of an auction on eBay for 10 rounds. Selling for 6 bucks. Now that means each bullet was sixty cents, now let me ask you what your life cost? Last week 33 people who were once alive and well were killed, with a bullet bought on eBay for less than a dollar a piece. Those were the lives of 33 people-4 of which were college professors-who did not deserve to die, who did not think they were going to die and were definitely NOT ready to be done living. I have mixed feeling on the decision of weather or not we should be aloud to buy and carry guns. I feel we should all be aloud the right after extensive test and classes, but after evening out the pros and cons I believe that our country should NOT allow people to buy guns. Unfortunately we cannot take the risk of those who have less self control than us, for those who can’t help but use violence to solve whatever predicament they are in-weather it be mental or physical.

I will argue that our country should not allow people to buy guns on a social, legal and moral level. I believe that as sad as it is, we cannot predict what people will do with the guns we sell them.

As I have already expressed in my opening my first and main reason why I believe guns should not be sold to the public is because we cannot predict what they will be used for. There are different uses for a gun, some of the ways I could think of were: to protect a home, to scare a family member, to ease a mind of the fear of being in danger, to kill someone, to harm someone, to look cool in front of your friends, go to the shooting range, to collect or to re-sell. There are many other reasons but all can potentially go wrong, and some inevitably will. How do we separate those who have no harmful intentions, those who intend to harm, and those who will accidentally harm? I thought that maybe we could test people, like a drivers license. If you want to own a gun you must pass a written test. But as students we know tests can be cheated through. So I thought maybe there should be a more vigorous test, like an anger test, see how much it takes to set a person off. But, again if people knew they were being tested they could always fake a reaction. So what do we give people a lie detector test to find out the intentions of use of the gun they are about to buy? Why not. If someone wants a gun bad enough then they would be more than willing to pay the amount of money for lie detector test, and if they aren’t-then they didn’t need a gun badly enough did they?

Now I have made it clear that because we unfortunately predict a person’s moral character being main reason number one why I think guns should not be sold to the public I want to share to you the second reason. We cannot predict where the gun ends up. Legally, even if you were required to past certain tests who’s to say someone wont steal the gun? Or who’s to say the buyer won’t resell the gun. One of the reasons I grew up feeling guns were unsafe to be sold to “regular old people” were the stories my nurse mother would tell me about children getting a hold of their parents, bothers, or uncles gun. You think that doesn’t happen often, but once is enough for me. There is no reason that anyone, especially a child should die an unexpected death because of someone else’s foolishness. And there I come back to the fact that most gun related deaths we hear about are not suicide but someone else causing harm to someone unwontedly. I was thinking of reason on ways to prevent guns from getting into the wrong hands, again back to the whole testing thing, But also a protective case to prevent unwanted accidents, or to prevent guns from being stolen. I am assuming there are very sturdy cases that keep a gun locked up and very inaccessible. This makes me think of another question though, if we can lock them up in cases, why cant we lock them up in a gun storage center where it would prevent risk of unwanted household accidents,