Just Search Them All

Just Search Them All

In the essay, "Just Take Away Their Guns", published in the New York Times in 1994, Collins Professor of Management and Pubic Policy at the University of California at Los Angeles, James Q. Wilson asserts that legal restraints on the lawful purchase of guns will have little effect on the illegal use of guns. The author goes on to suggest that abandoning Fourth Amendment rights, and allowing police officers to make random street frisks will ultimately reduce the number of people who carry guns illegally. Wilson has had several books published on similar subjects but this essay was anything but impressive. The essay is unsound due to false premises and invalid logic including the fallacies of undocumented statistics, strawperson argument, hasty generalization, false appeal to humor, and a black and white fallacy which overshadows the entirety of the essay.

Professor Wilson's premise that gun control will not solve the number of people who carry guns illegally bears no evidence since a strict gun control law has never successfully passed. Wilson's use of statistics does nothing for his argument since more than half of the statistics used his essay are undocumented. Wilson uses the statistic that "200 million guns [are] in private ownership, about one-third of [these] handguns...[of these], only about two percent... [will] commit crimes" (para 2) yet he goes on to say that one-sixth of the handguns used by serious criminals were not purchased from gun shops or pawnshops but obtained through private ownerships, stealing or borrowing. If some guns used by serious criminals are purchased from private parties, stricter gun control laws could possibly deter private parties from selling their guns to those without a permit, thus keeping guns out of the hands of criminals. Wilson also states that in "1992 the police arrested about 240,000 people for illegally possessing or carrying a weapon...which is only about one-fourth as many who were arrested for public drunkeness" (para 7). His statistic fails to mention which police department this information came from. By leaving this information out of the essay, readers do not know what the population of the county or state is compared to number of arrests, which is misleading. In paragraph 12, Wilson's argument that "those who urge us to forbid or severely restrict the sale of guns...adopt a position that is politically absurd...[Wilson claims that these people believe that the] government, having failed to protect [their] person and [their] property from criminal assault, now intends to deprive [them] of the opportunity to protect [themselves]." This is a strawperson argument and a hasty generalization. Not all gun control advocates believe this, and Wilson makes it out to seem that this the unanimous belief of all those in favor of gun control. Wilson