School Speech im giving.

[Dr.Mall Ninja]

In my communications class i need to give a 7 to 11 minute speech on any subject to persuade people. The topic I want to do is that we in the United States don't need any more gun laws. While I'm going to be doing research myself, does anybody have any statistics that would be useful and a source to verify them, or ideas in general.

 

[Birdmang]

I just got a book from the library on gun law/control stats, its a series that releases a book once a year on all different topics and is completely neutral. Ill edit and post the title here.

Some advice, be careful with gun control in universities. If this is a basic coms class you probably have a TA who doesn't know how to grade well yet and might let his views come across. Its also hard to persuade people on gun control/laws...

 

[benEzra]

If the "assault weapon" fraud might come up (may still be an interesting topic), check this out:

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_20.html

If you download the Excel version and sum the columns, you'll find that all rifles combined (including so-called "assault weapons", e.g. small- and intermediate-caliber civilian autoloaders with modern styling) accounted for 2.6% of murders in 2008. It might be interesting to compare your state's Rifles total to the Fists and Feet total, the Edged Weapons total, etc.

Gun accident rates:
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/benEzra/84

I'll link to some more later, if I have time.

 

[Madcap_Magician]

My advice, after seeing dozens of letters to the editor, papers, and essays on this issue posted to all kinds of gun forums, is simple.

Just because you're right doesn't mean you can scrimp on the evidence, writing, or logic.

Things that we take for granted as first principles (i.e. something that is self-evidently true) are not always seen the same way by other people.

This means that you must provide the logical chain of your position, not simply make bald assertions that would go well in signature lines on this forum but have no place in academic writing. You must use peer-reviewed sources for your paper, not something you found on some guy's web page on the internet (Note, you can use the internet to find these sources, but if you're going to cite something, it's more credible if it's original research, not something that someone with no credentials says about someone else's research).

Also, don't make wild claims that your research can't back up.

It may seem self-evident to most people on this forum that shall-issue concealed carry laws have a negative effect on crime, but the research about this is not that ironclad, and there are a lot of factors that go into it.

Lastly, remember this maxim of persuasive academic writing or speaking-

CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION.

 

[mdThanatos]

From my experience with my COMM class, we had to do an informative, argumentative and then persuasive speech which required a call to action, i.e. writing to a senator or community activism. For me I did my persuasive on allowing people to continue to own firearms and carry them. I don't seem to have a copy of it anymore as I redid my computer and I didn't save it but what I did was incorporate the aspects of the informative and argumentative into the speech.

For example, you can argue that gun control laws take away the people's right to adequately defend themselves and use crime statistics.

Informative information that you can incorporate is that firearms are used for sport, highlight the positive aspect, I would do this first to get them a little easy about it. You can use SASS and IDPA as examples as well as the use of firearms as a means to gather food, illustrate that some areas of the country don't have a Wal-Mart or national chain of grocery stores and that they hunt to get their food. Compare this to a hobby such as racing, does anyone really need their car to do a 1/4 mile in ten seconds or do they need to go over 75 miles an hour, that's the fastest speed limit near me.

Another aspect of gun ownership is, if our citizens didn't have firearms, we wouldn't be here in this country today(not trying to start an argument but just trying to give him an idea as how to manipulate information to get his point across). You can state that if we hadn't had our firearms we wouldn't have been able to have a militia which lead to an army which lead to our independence from Great Britain.

I don't know if you are allowed to use any kind of props with your speeches but it was a requirement for at least one in my class, so I brought in my holster I use for my SASS matches, empty of course. The closing I had for my speech was to pick up my empty holsters and show it to my classmates and state that there are many people in this country that want to see this become permanent by enacting more laws to reduce the ownership of firearms, please let your representatives know that you don't want to see this happen, or something along those lines.

 

[tack]

Go here
http://www.gunfacts.info/

and read their pdf file
http://www.gunfacts.info/pdfs/gun-facts/5.1/gun-facts-5.1-screen.pdf

read it three times and you will have the material at your fingertips.