Rhetorical Analysis Of What Makes A Shooter Do It By Mike Macintyre
851 Words4 Pages
When Mike Macintyre wrote “What Makes a Shooter Do It?” he writes in first person and it feels like it is from a very personal and reflective place. His use of pathos creates a connection with his audience but it also creates a sense of fear, the ethos part of his article comes not only from his knowledge as a journalist, but also from his sources in order to build trust, and the use of logos shows how the world has changed and gives the audience as sense of hope for the future if there are stronger gun laws. Macintyre creates a sense of connection with his audience by sharing his personal experience with a “future” mass shooter. This gives him an empathic audience because they can rationalize how he might be feeling by putting themselves…show more content… He names two shooters from some of the most recent shootings, at the time of his article, and asks how these two individuals ended up on the path to take innocent lives. This creates a sense of helplessness with the audience, some sense of helplessness, because there is not a knowable answer. The author includes a pathos aspect as well as a logos when he quotes a researcher for the Southern Poverty Law group. This gentleman’s word on how many shooters want to bigger than their own small lives and that the internet has a lot to do with creating that feeling. This is a scary thought because the internet is uncontrollable, and this will feed into the audience’s sense of hopelessness and helplessness. The biggest pull on the heartstrings, the author quotes from a letter that a shooter’s parents wrote their son…show more content… Like the FBI study, the author uses the intertwined aspect of the article when he quotes Brad Bushman, a psychology profession at Ohio State University who served on a White how task force on gun violence. Bushman believes that guns are great equalizers and that they make people feel powerful, when without the gun they don’t. This can evoke the sense of fear from the audience with the vison in their heads of a person standing proudly holding a gun. It can evoke a sense that something needs to be done. As an example of how the police can stop future threats of violence, the author cites different court records from the state of Connecticut that could be viewed as near misses. He cites three different cases where the police were able to confiscate weapons from mentally unstable individuals that were acting irrationally and had access to guns. The only point where the author uses both pathos and logos to create a sense of outrage is where he state that the three shooters had legally been allowed to own guns by” regulatory loopholes and bureaucratic bungling” (Macintyre par. 16). This wording is what will drive the pathos aspect because it puts the blame on something that the audience can fix, the gun control