Just Take Away Their Guns By James Wilson Analysis

Analysis of “Just Take Away Their Guns”
James Q. Wilson is a man who is very passionate about the issue of gun control. However, in his essay “Just Take Away Their Guns,” that passion gets the best of him in what is decidedly a very biased and unsupported argument for the implementation of “stop-and-frisk” policies in place of more gun sale restrictions. While his claim that people need guns to defend themselves is at times convincing, he fails to provide enough evidence to convince his audience that police frisks will solve the issue of gun violence, instead just seemingly assuming that his solution is a better option than more gun legislation. That, along with his complete dismissal of gun-control advocates and his lack of consideration for …show more content…
He all but ignores the potential negatives of his proposal. While he acknowledges at the very end that racial profiling may be an issue, he passes it off as merely an inconvenience, referring to it and similar problems as “complaints,” which suggests he does not see such arguments as legitimate (Wilson 128). And what about the dramatic increase in the number of arrests that is sure to follow? Both local and federal prisons are already filled beyond capacity, and implementing Wilson’s idea would only further push authorities to experiment on how many people can fit into a six-by-eight jail cell. And what about the danger to police? My dad being a police officer, I know firsthand how unpredictable people can be. “Stop-and-frisk” policies will only increase the number of run-ins between law enforcement and gun-wielding criminals, encounters which at any time can escalate and lead to one party or the other getting shot and possibly killed. Even he admits that “Guns often convert spontaneous outbursts of anger into fatal encounters” (Wilson 128). Wilson all but ignores the social injustices that a nationwide increase in police frisking would invite, thereby greatly diminishing the credibility of his …show more content…
I grew up in a conservative household, and my family and I have always held very conservative beliefs. But we always had respect for the opinions of other people, even those we did not necessarily agree with, such as gun control supporters. Wilson, however, completely dismisses the pro- gun control argument, at one point going so far as to say that gun control advocates “adopt a position that is politically absurd” (127). Wilson’s bias is evident throughout the essay, as he devotes five full paragraphs arguing against gun control, about the same amount of space which he spends actually discussing the subject of his essay, police frisking (125-128). This behavior makes it seem as if Wilson is writing this paper to point out what he perceives as flaws in the pro-gun control argument and is simply using police frisking for a topic as a means to get people to read his essay. I believe that if Wilson would have spent less time on bashing gun-control advocates and more time pointing out facts and statistics that would help persuade readers of the effectiveness of police frisking, his essay would have been much more