Assignment task:
The current political argument that guns are harmful and should not be able to be owned by individual people in the United States has no merit and should not be discussed in college courses. I personally own guns, and I don't see how they can be harmful in and of themselves. And, I am not the only one to have this opinion. Many important people, including writers, political leaders, and entertainers who have been interviewed by the magazine industry own guns and apparently agree with me. In education, we are told to use scientific studies to support our decisions. Following this logic, we can see through research that there are no scientific studies to support the idea that guns are harmful in and of themselves. Therefore, it is logical to consider that the ownership of guns is not the problem that some people in the media would currently have you believe. Many of those who are in the media and making a statement that guns are harmful and should not be able to be owned by American citizens could learn something from Buddhists in our country. Buddhists may choose not to believe in a particular religion, but they don't go around insisting that religions are harmful to people and trying to prevent others from having their own beliefs.
Ever since the media became so strongly against Americans owning their own guns, the freedom of our society has begun to erode. For example, the United States was recently ranked as one of the worst countries in the world for human trafficking (a modern form of slavery, with illegal smuggling and trading of people, for forced labor or sexual exploitation). We were also ranked as having the highest percentage of deaths from opioid use in the world - so high that our entire society's life expectancy was reduced by two years. If those who are forcing the political agenda to remove our rights to own guns in America would stop their illogical rantings, perhaps we could focus on these far more pressing issues in our society. In light of these far more pressing issues, those who insist that guns are harmful and should not be able to be owned by individual people in the United States shouldn't be surprised if their protests are met with violence, for truly, their argument is baseless.
Using the passage above
Question 1- Identify and reconstruct the argument into standard form on an argument.
Question 2- Is the argument deductive or inductive? What type of deductive or inductive argument is this? Is the argument strong, weak, valid, or invalid?
Question 3- Is the argument valid/invalid or cogent/uncogent?
Question 4- Critique the passage. To what degree are the claims and conclusions supported by good reasoning? Do the claims conflict with your background knowledge or other statements we have good reason to believe? Why is accepting the author's conclusion reasonable or unreasonable?
Question 5- Construct an improved argument in support of the same conclusion as Question 1.