Violence In Adam Gopnik's Shootings

In Adam Gopnik’s essay “Shootings,” he shows concerned with the growth of gun violence in the United Sates, and the lack of action from the government in making strong and restrictive gun control laws to prevent further deaths and massacres by guns. Gopnik was even more concerned on how easy it is for people with a history of mental illness acquiring weapons that were only made to kill people. By comparing United States with others countries which have restrictive and tightens gun control laws, Gopnik shows how deaths by mass shooting has decreased in those countries since the government started to taking action, and they never had to experience the same incident as severe as the first one. The main purpose of the Gopnik essay is to persuade …show more content…
At the beginning of his essay, Gopnik used a passionate and emotional tone to address to his public readers because he wanted to impact as many people as possible, making them to empathize with this dramatic incident and read more to figure out what he has to say, by telling them “to imagine the feelings of the police as they carried the bodies and heard the ringing is heartrending; to imagine the feelings of the parents who were calling dread, desperate hope for sudden answer and the bliss of reassurance, dawning grief is unbearable.” Beside calling the reader’s attention, he wanted to let people aware that united we can make our government to act, when he points out that “in Quebec, after a school shooting took the lives of fourteen women in 1989, the survivors helped begin a gun-control movement that resulted in legislation bringing stronger, though far from sufficient, gun laws to Canada.” The rest of essay he used a persuasive tone to address to the U.S government by stating real facts like, “United States claimed seven on a recent list of the fourteen worst mass shootings in Western democracies since the nineteen-sixties, and just as important, no other country on the list has had a repeated performance as severe as the first.” He also makes comparisons about the others countries reaction and United States inaction after mass shootings, like he mention in one of his example that “in Paris suburb of Nanterre, in 2002, a man killed eight people at a municipal meeting. Gun control became a key issue in the Presidential election that year, and there has been no repeated incident.” Unlike United States that “forty years ago, a man killed fourteen people on a college campus in Austin, Texas; this year, a man killed thirty-two in Blachsburg, Virginia. Not enough was done between those two massacres to make weapons of mass killing harder to obtain.” All those