2A speech, please help me prepare

[U.S. Patriot]

This is some good stuff. I have to write a paper on the Militia and gun control in America. I have a book to read but will need more information.

 

[kimmi]

I've glanced over the links people have posted and they all have great information if you want to check them out!

I don't know how focused your paper needs to be, but I know I'm going to have trouble narrowing down all of the statistics, history, and other information to make it fit the requirements for this speech!

 

[dross]

I've glanced over the links people have posted and they all have great information if you want to check them out!

I don't know how focused your paper needs to be, but I know I'm going to have trouble narrowing down all of the statistics, history, and other information to make it fit the requirements for this speech!

The trick to that is to pick the point you want to drive home, and stay with that point even if it means you don't use some really great stuff that doesn't support that point. It's the hardest thing about persuasive communication.

I suggest opening and closing with an emotional appeal. There was a great story a while back, maybe someone remembers, about a woman in California who had a restraining order against her boyfriend who had promised to kill her. The police told her that they can't give her twenty-four hour protection, and that she should get a gun. She went to buy one only to discover that there is a waiting period in California. She was terrified.

 

[Timjoebillybob]

Like this perhaps?

The Racist Roots of Gun Control


JPFO- No Guns for Negroes-download or view

Two good links

Kimmi, remember, that "gun control", has been around a long time, a lot longer, than 1935, or 1968... It was used a lot, after the Civil War, to keep blacks, from owning guns, even though, blacks fought on the north, against slavery... Remember, your History class, when a black man, was only 3/5 of a man ????? Reasearch, and keep us posted....

It was around a lot longer in the Americas than the War between the States. There were laws in the colonies going back to at least 1640 preventing Blacks and Indians from possessing arms.
Here's a link to a page that shows the statues and years enacted.
The Racist Origins Of Gun Control

 

[U.S. Patriot]

I've glanced over the links people have posted and they all have great information if you want to check them out!

I don't know how focused your paper needs to be, but I know I'm going to have trouble narrowing down all of the statistics, history, and other information to make it fit the requirements for this speech!

Funny you mentioned that. The book I have to read is almost 400 pages. Yet our report only has to be four pages long. I could write that without the book. It's not making it easy. I'm thinking maybe a page to a page and a half on the history of the Militia. Then the rest on gun control itself.

 

[Cru]

Funny you mentioned that. The book I have to read is almost 400 pages. Yet our report only has to be four pages long. I could write that without the book. It's not making it easy. I'm thinking maybe a page to a page and a half on the history of the Militia. Then the rest on gun control itself.

write more. Write 10 pages and see if you get extra credit!

 

[kimmi]

The trick to that is to pick the point you want to drive home, and stay with that point even if it means you don't use some really great stuff that doesn't support that point. It's the hardest thing about persuasive communication.

I suggest opening and closing with an emotional appeal. There was a great story a while back, maybe someone remembers, about a woman in California who had a restraining order against her boyfriend who had promised to kill her. The police told her that they can't give her twenty-four hour protection, and that she should get a gun. She went to buy one only to discover that there is a waiting period in California. She was terrified.

Great example! The opening and closing gets kind of tricky, because I have to present my speech to a hypothetical audience. For this, I'm going to be trying to persuade the Chicago legislature to cut back on their strict gun-control laws. It would be much easier if I could just gear the whole thing towards my classmates, but oh well!

 

[U.S. Patriot]

write more. Write 10 pages and see if you get extra credit!

He already said no extra credit will be given out period. The other part that sucks is having to list anything quoted from the book or other sources. That's why I word stuff in my own words.

 

[Bill of Rights]

Great example! The opening and closing gets kind of tricky, because I have to present my speech to a hypothetical audience. For this, I'm going to be trying to persuade the Chicago legislature to cut back on their strict gun-control laws. It would be much easier if I could just gear the whole thing towards my classmates, but oh well!

Why didn't you say so? Your opening should probably start with, "Good afternoon, dumbasses."

Also, make sure you use 1st grade words so you don't confuse them too badly. You might consider having a planned break, too, so when they're confronted by the thought of the mean, scary guns, they have time to run get a hug from someone.

You get to decide how serious I'm being.

Edit: Of note, while your phrasing is probably more accurate either way, I'm not sure if you mean the Chicago city council or the IL State Legislature

Blessings,
Bill

 

[Dashman010]

This may contain a little legalese, in that it is taken from a written judicial opinion, but I think it is possibly one of the best 2A arguments I have ever read. It is from Alex Kozinski, a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge, after his colleagues determined that the 2nd Amendment did not protect individual rights (this was before Heller). Take some snippets and incorporate in your argument and it will be a good showing for the pro-gun crowd.

Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that "speech, or . . . the press" also means the Internet, and that "persons, houses, papers, and effects" also means public telephone booths. When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases--or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we're none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.

It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as spring-boards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it's using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences.

The able judges of the panel majority are usually very sympathetic to individual rights, but they have succumbed to the temptation to pick and choose. Had they brought the same generous approach to the Second Amendment that they routinely bring to the First, Fourth and selected portions of the Fifth, they would have had no trouble finding an individual right to bear arms. Indeed, to conclude otherwise, they had to ignore binding precedent. United States v. Miller (1939) did not hold that the defendants lacked standing to raise a Second Amendment defense, even though the government argued the collective rights theory in its brief. The Supreme Court reached the Second Amendment claim and rejected it on the merits after finding no evidence that Miller's weapon--a sawed-off shotgun--was reasonably susceptible to militia use. We are bound not only by the outcome of Miller but also by its rationale. If Miller's claim was dead on arrival because it was raised by a person rather than a state, why would the Court have bothered discussing whether a sawed-off shotgun was suitable for militia use? The panel majority not only ignores Miller's test; it renders most of the opinion wholly superfluous. As an inferior court, we may not tell the Supreme Court it was out to lunch when it last visited a constitutional provision.

The majority falls prey to the delusion--popular in some circles--that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth--born of experience--is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. Our own sorry history bears this out: Disarmament was the tool of choice for subjugating both slaves and free blacks in the South. In Florida, patrols searched blacks' homes for weapons, confiscated those found and punished their owners without judicial process. In the North, by contrast, blacks exercised their right to bear arms to defend against racial mob violence. As Chief Justice Taney well appreciated, the institution of slavery required a class of people who lacked the means to resist. See Dred Scott v. Sandford, (1857) (finding black citizenship unthinkable because it would give blacks the right to "keep and carry arms wherever they went"). A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble.

All too many of the other great tragedies of history--Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few--were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed--where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

Fortunately, the Framers were wise enough to entrench the right of the people to keep and bear arms within our constitutional structure. The purpose and importance of that right was still fresh in their minds, and they spelled it out clearly so it would not be forgotten. Despite the panel's mighty struggle to erase these words, they remain, and the people themselves can read what they say plainly enough: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The sheer ponderousness of the panel's opinion--the mountain of verbiage it must deploy to explain away these fourteen short words of constitutional text--refutes its thesis far more convincingly than anything I might say. The panel's labored effort to smother the Second Amendment by sheer body weight has all the grace of a sumo wrestler trying to kill a rattlesnake by sitting on it--and is just as likely to succeed.

 

[kimmi]

Edit: Of note, while your phrasing is probably more accurate either way, I'm not sure if you mean the Chicago city council or the IL State Legislature

It would be whoever makes the Chicago city laws. Definitely not the IL State legislature. I don't know a lot about municipal government, but I guess then it would be the Chicago city council. Chicago's gun laws are stricter than the IL State ones, so I want to direct this towards them.

And I just figured this specific "audience" thing out this morning.

 

[dross]

Great example! The opening and closing gets kind of tricky, because I have to present my speech to a hypothetical audience. For this, I'm going to be trying to persuade the Chicago legislature to cut back on their strict gun-control laws. It would be much easier if I could just gear the whole thing towards my classmates, but oh well!

I suggest you still gear it towards your classmates. It's another good principle of persuasive speech to never overestimate your audience.

 

[Woodrow]

Columbine and the Virginia Tech shootings were the result of a failure in existing gun laws. Harris and Klebold used guns obtained through straw-purchases and Seung-Hui Cho had been adjudicated "mentally unsound." There were gaps in the NICS, but he should not have been able to purchase the firearms.

In short, the current laws on the books should have prevented these two events. There is no litigious solution, because the laws don't dissuade people interested in breaking them. New laws won't prevent crime anymore than the old laws did. Murder is illegal, but that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone intent on killing another individual. What the current laws do succeed in is preventing law-abiding citizens from having access to a means of defense.

 

[kimmi]

I suggest you still gear it towards your classmates. It's another good principle of persuasive speech to never overestimate your audience.

It's actually an explicit requirement of the assignment that I not gear it towards my classmates.

 

[rmabrey]

I think the best counter to the "wild west" argument is simple facts. The "Wild West" had a lower crime rate than the eastern cities of the day, and a much lower crime rate than America today. The "wild west" with all those guns was a much safer place to be than any American city with all their heavy gun control is now.

an armed society is a polite society

 

[Jeremiah]

look up the murder rates in the old west, pretty low.

https://www.indianagunowners.com/fo...35489-fwpd_chief_rusty_york-2.html#post388824

here are some thoughts I put to paper once

 

[AJMD429]

Our organization, Doctors for Sensible Gun Laws, has a page of "favorite links" which has lots of "intellectual ammunition" for defending firearms freedom.

It is our position that widespread, anonymous* gun ownership is one of the best ways to assure safe streets and societal stability, and we believe there is ample national and international data, of both historic and contemporary nature, to support this assertion. 'Theorizing' along the lines of 'if but one life is saved' is disingenuous when empiric evidence shows that for every one life saved there will be dozens or hundreds lost.

* ('registration' is the universal 'first-step' towards enabling genocide, which dwarfs crime, suicide, and terrorism combined as a cause of death - we average around 5,000 murders committed by police and military against their own citizens per day, around the world, exclusively in countries which began their 'gun control' with innocent-sounding 'registration', to 'reduce crime', because 'honest citizens should have nothing to hide'...)

Please check out our "favorite links" - Doctors for Sensible Gun Laws - www.dsgl.org/links

ESPECIALLY see Kate's and Suter's articles from the legal and medical literature respectively. (Citing articles from "Guns & Ammo" to persuade anti-gunners isn't all that effective, although the National Rifle Association DID receive citation in the 1970's, along with the American Library Association, as "one of the two most consistently truthful lobbying organizations" as per Congressional Digest...).

The Law Review Article by Kates (a liberal criminologist) and his physician co-authors offers an unusually scathing assessment (especially coming from a law review journal) of the integrity of 'gun control' proponents in the medical community - a good article to cite to keep THEM on the defensive vs. assuming that as 'public health advocates', anti-gun physicians claim some moral 'high ground'.

Here's just a section of the thoroughly-referenced (1/3 of it is the citations, some of which are included below, and I think are even active in this 'quote'), 83-page article:

Link - GUNS AND PUBLIC HEALTH: EPIDEMIC OF VIOLENCE OR PANDEMIC OF PROPAGANDA?
61 Tenn. L. Rev. 513-596 (1994).

XIII. A Critique of Overt Mendacity

A 1989 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association approvingly quoted a CDC official's assertion that his work for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention involved "systematically build[ing]a case that owning firearms causes death."[258] The CDC official later claimed that JAMA had misquoted him and offered the only repudiation of the anti-gun political agenda we have found in a health advocacy publication, characterizing it as "anathema to any unbiased scientific inquiry because it assumes the conclusion at the outset and then attempts to find evidence to support it."[259]

Unfortunately, that is precisely what CDC is doing. Indeed, this has subsequently been avowed by the prior official's successor.[260] Even more unfortunately, CDC and other health advocate sages build their case not only by suppressing facts, but by overt fraud, fabricating statistics, and falsifying references to support them.[261] The following are but a few of the many examples documented in a recent paper co-authored by professors at Columbia Medical School and Rutgers University Law School.

The first instance represents a lamentable exception to our generalization that comparisons of gun ownership and murder rates through the 1970s and 1980s find no place in the health advocacy literature.[262] Some health sages go so far as to overtly misrepresent that murder rates increased over that period, and then correlate this misrepresentation with the same period's steadily increasing gun ownership so as to lend spurious support to their more-guns-mean-more-murder shibboleth. Thus, a 1989 Report to the United States Congress by the CDC stated that "ince the early 1970s the year-to-year fluctuations in firearm availability has [sic] paralleled the numbers of homicides."[263] We leave it to the readers of this Article to judge how a 69% increase in handgun ownership over the fifteen year period from 1974 to 1988 could honestly be described as having "paralleled" a 14.2% decrease in homicide during that same period.[264]

Understandably, the CDC Report offered no supporting reference for its claim of parallelism. However, the inventive Dr. Diane Schetky, and two equally inventive CDC writers--Gordon Smith and Henry Falk--in a separate article actually do provide purportedly supporting citations for the claim that "[h]andguns account for only 20% of the firearms in use today, but they are involved in the majority of both criminal and unintentional firearm injuries."[265] The problems with this claim are that the claim is false in every respect and that the citations are fabrications. The purpose of the claim is to exaggerate the comparative risks of handguns vis-a-vis long guns so as to fortify the cause of handgun prohibition and avoid admitting the major problem we have already addressed--that, because handguns are innately far safer than long guns, if a handgun ban caused defensive gun owners to keep loaded long guns instead (as handgun ban advocates and experts concur would be the case), thousands more might die in fatal gun accidents annually.[266]

The only citation given by either Schetky or Smith and Falk to support their claim that handguns comprise only 20% of all guns, yet are involved in 90% of gun accidents and crime, is the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports.[267] Understandably, no page citations are given, because the citations are simply falsified. As anyone familiar with the Uniform Crime Reports knows, they provide no data on gun ownership, and thus no comparative data on handgun versus long gun ownership. Nor do the Uniform Crime Reports provide data on accidents in general, thus no data on gun accidents, and thus no comparative data on the incidence of handgun accidents versus long guns accidents. Schetky, Smith, and Falk could have found data on these matters in the National Safety Council's Accident Facts, but those data would not have suited their purpose because these statistics do not support the point they sought to make.

Furthermore, the Uniform Crime Reports give no data on the number of persons injured in gun crimes or the number of such injures in handgun crimes versus long gun crimes. They do give such data for gun murders, but even those data do not support Schetky's claim that 90% are committed with handguns.[268] Every one of the other purported statistics given by Schetky, Smith, and Falk is not only wrong, but wrong in only one particular direction. Each false statistic errs in supporting their point, whereas an accurate rendition of the statistic would not have done so. It is, of course, elementary that innocent mistakes tend to be random and to balance each other rather than all erring in favor of the position for which they are presented.

Another instance of overt mendacity involves the remarkable Dr. Sloan. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, we classified other mischaracterizations by him as gun-aversive-dyslexia. It strains even that generous category, however, to so classify an inability to accurately read and describe one's own articles. The gravamen of the Sloan two-city comparison discussed previously was that the strict 1978 Canadian gun law caused Vancouver to have less homicide than Seattle, where any responsible adult can buy a handgun.[269] But as an NRA representative pointed out in a critical letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, the authors had made no effort to determine how Canadian homicide had changed since adopting the law.[270] In fact, the homicide rate had not fallen, but rather it had risen slightly, with handgun use unchanged at about one-eighth of homicides. Sloan tried to extricate himself from this embarrassment by mendaciously asserting that the "intent of our article was not to evaluate the effect of the 1978 Canadian gun law."[271] Readers may judge for themselves how well that squares with the article's actual conclusion: "[R]estriction of access to firearms ... is associated with lower rates of homicide."[272] Health advocate readers have certainly understood the significance of the article to be that it "demonstrated the beneficial effect of [Canada's] tighter regulation" of firearms.[273]

It is misleading to suggest that, heavily politicized though it is, the anti-gun health advocacy literature commonly exhibits overt mendacity, as opposed to fraudulent misleading by half-truth and suppression of material facts. Overt mendacity is not infrequent, however, and numerous examples will be documented in the next section and in the balance of this Article.
​

ALSO see R.J. Rummel's work on Genocide/Democide "Death by Government" - he's documented that genocide kills around 5,000 innocent citizens every DAY.
Link - Freedom, Democide, War: Home Page

AND see Zelman and Stevens' "Death by Gun Control", where they tie that genocide to the disarmament began with gun registration -
Link - Death by "Gun Control"

AND see Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership's "Gun Control - Gateway to Tyranny", which documents the 1968 Gun Control Act's origin as an almost paragraph-by-paragraph translation of the 1938 Nazi Weapons Act.
Link - "Gun Control": Gateway to Tyranny

Hope this helps, and isn't too late.

ALWAYS keep the gun-banners on the defensive - they push for dangerous, counterproductive, 'symbolic' legislation, which gives them warm fuzzies, and a sense of 'accomplishment', at the expense of REAL lives lost.

It is NOT a "balance of safe streets vs. convenience of 'sportsmen'", first of all, because our founding fathers didn't sit around writing a Bill of Rights which has to do with timeless concepts of freedom and the balance of power between government and citizen, when Bubba the Deerhunter raised his hand and said "Hey, when you're puttin' in them 'mendment thingies, can you put one what sez me and Clem kin hunt deerz when we want, so long as we use 'legitimate sporting firearms'...?"

Secondly, the 'balance' favors safe streets (crime prevention) and social stability (genocide prevention), WHEN there is 'convenience for sportsmen', and gun laws are minimal to none.

By the way, I have ZERO respect for the 'sportsmen' who fight laws which inconvenience their particular firearms hobby, yet do nothing to fight more dangerous laws, such as gun registration, 'military-style' firearms bans, etc.

Andrew Johnstone, RPh/MD
Doctors for Sensible Gun Laws - Doctors for Sensible Gun Laws
"First do no harm" - gun control LAWS lead to far more innocent deaths than 'easy access' ever could...

 

[kimmi]

Definitely not too late. Thank you everyone for your continued help! I have until Nov. 8th to get everything written out and then another 2 weeks to practice delivery and get my PowerPoint perfect.

 

[Cru]

Definitely not too late. Thank you everyone for your continued help! I have until Nov. 8th to get everything written out and then another 2 weeks to practice delivery and get my PowerPoint perfect.

WTF! Who does their homework 2 weeks ahead of time?

 

[Jeremiah]

Fact Sheet: Guns Save Lives - Gun Owners Of America

lots of great info on that page, with accompanying citations