Response to “Do We Have the Courage to Stop This?” by Nicholas Kristof

        In Kristof’s short text “Do We Have the Courage to Stop This?” he goes into detail on why gun laws and regulations should be stricter. I believe that Kristof’s main claims are that he believes that making guns harder to obtain by regular civilians can reduce the rates of people dying due to being shot.  Kristof takes evidence and uses it in his favor to support a lot of the claims he makes in his text. He writes, “The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has five pages of regulations about ladders, … Ladders kill around 300 Americans a year, and guns 30,000.” This statement shows a fact that laws on gun regulations aren't as strict as those imposed on ladders even though guns kill one hundred times more people that ladders do. Statistics is also used in Kristof’s text he writes, “In Australia in 1996, a mass killing of 35 people galvanized the nation’s conservative prime minister to ban certain rapid-fire long guns…The law did not end gun ownership in Australia. It reduced the number of firearms in private hands by one-fifth, The murder rate with firearms has dropped by more than 40 percent…” Kristof not only uses facts and statistics to support his claim but he is also very selective of the evidence he puts in his text. He only uses evidence that will gravitate the reader to be in agreement with his claim which is a very effective strategy because he can easily persuade anyone who is reading the text.