Persuasive Articles on Gun Control

Persuasive Articles on Gun Control By Jamie Taylor

Persuading an audience can be done in several different fashions, one of which is Hugh Rank’s Model of Persuasion. Rank’s model states that two major strategies are used to achieve the particular goal of persuasion. These strategies are nicely set into two main schemas; the first method is to exaggerate an aspect of something, known as “intensify.” While the second is to discredit it, which is referred to as “downplay.” Al Franken, Jeffrey Snyder, Harlan Ellison, and George Will, have all written persuasive articles about gun control.
In reading all of the various articles on gun control by authors, I found George F. Will’s The Last Word to be the most persuasive. Will wrote his piece about gun control in response to Mr. Snyder’s piece which both suggested and condoned gun use. The reason Will’s response and stance on gun control was so powerful was because he was able to incorporate quotations from Snyder’s article and rebut them with factual and logical information. Will used Rank’s model of persuasion to downplay Snyder’s arguments, and refuted them with his own facts which he intensified to an extent. Will did however take five pages to build his argument for the regulation of guns, and quoted Snyder too frequently, a more succinct and economical approach would have made this article that much more persuasive.
Second place for the most persuasive piece on gun control is Al Franken’s Phil Gramm, Gun