Response paper (shots). 1st draft

i have a homework in my inter national writing class. plese follow the instructions:

Shots

By Hendrik Hertzberg

January 7, 2013 Issue

Within hours of the unspeakable massacre of twenty first graders and six teachers and staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, on Friday, December 14th, bookers for the television networks’ Sunday-morning political talk shows hit the phones, trolling for guests. They were seeking, among others, politicians, public officials, and prominent citizens willing to defend the proposition that military-style munitions—high-powered semiautomatic assault rifles and pistols that can fire a round every second, use magazines holding as many as a hundred bullets of a type specially engineered to liquefy the insides of human beings, and be outfitted 

with accessories like grenade launchers, flash suppressors, bayonet lugs, pistol grips, and collapsible stocks—should continue to be readily available to all comers, with or without minimal background checks or waiting periods. The bookers came up empty. 

 “We reached out to all thirty-one pro-gun-rights senators in the new Congress to invite them on the program to share their views on this subject this morning,” David Gregory, of NBC, told his “Meet the Press” audience. “We had no takers.” The National Rifle Association, which had instantly deactivated its Facebook page and silenced its Twitter feed, refused all interview invitations and issued a statement explaining—admitting?—that it was shutting its big mouth “as a matter of common decency.” When it finally opened that mouth, a week later, out came a demand for N.R.A.-trained guards in every single American school: a hundred thousand schools, a hundred thousand guards, a hundred thousand guns, a hundred million dollars in new business for the N.R.A.’s “corporate partners” in the gun industry.

It was hard, in the massacre’s immediate aftermath, to find a presentable advocate for the view that the No. 1 cause of gun violence is a shortage of guns. (The No. 2 cause, presumably, is a surplus of people, since people, not guns, kill people.) “Fox News Sunday” and its host, Chris Wallace, had to settle for Representative Louie Gohmert, of Texas. Representative Gohmert, a birther and a climate-change denier, is normally dismissible as an amusing eccentric, a self-lampooning clown. Not this time. His chilling advice for Sandy Hook’s murdered principal—“I wish to God she had had an M-4 in her office, locked up, so when she heard gunfire she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands, but she takes him out, takes his head off, before he can kill those precious kids”—has been widely quoted and widely deplored. What Gohmert said next has received less notice. Wallace pressed him further on why he thinks civilians should possess weapons like the M-4 (the Congressman’s choice) and the AR-15 (the school shooter’s choice and the top-selling rifle in the nation, notably in the past two weeks). “Well,” Gohmert replied, 

for the reason George Washington said: a free people should be an armed people. It insures against the tyranny of the government. If they know that the biggest army is the American people, then you don’t have the tyranny that came from King George. That is why it was put in there. That’s why, once you start drawing the line, where do you stop?

After Sandy Hook, as after the Columbine horror, in 1999, and the dozens of mass shootings since, many Americans, gun owners among them, wondered why any sane person would require a rapid-fire killing machine with a foot-long banana clip to feel safe in his or her home or person, let alone to take target practice, shoot skeet, or hunt rabbits. But, for Hobbesian gun nuts of Gohmert’s ilk, the essence of the Second Amendment, 

when all is said and done, is not about any of that. Its real, irreducible purpose is to enable some self-designated fraction of the American people, in a pinch, to make war against the American government—to overthrow it by force and violence, if that is deemed necessary. If that’s the line you draw, then where, logically, do you stop? In Georgian times, when the amendment was ratified, the most fearsome weapon anyone, soldier or civilian, could carry was a single-shot musket. And today? “Shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles don’t shoot down black helicopters, people with shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles shoot down black helicopters”? Gohmert is a fringe figure, but the fringe is as long as an AR-15’s barrel. His seditious fantasies of freelance insurrection are shared by a nontrivial portion of the N.R.A. membership and board, by the N.R.A.’s feral kid brother, the Gun Owners of America, and by a gaggle of locked-and-loaded politicians who, not long ago, were threatening “Second Amendment remedies” for policy offenses like the Affordable Care Act. 

President Obama has been uncharacteristically passionate and unusually resolute in his determination to push for stronger gun controls early in the upcoming session of the new Congress. The most obviously sensible solutions, such as registering guns like cars and licensing their owners like drivers, are universally and, alas, correctly seen as out of reach. Not even Lyndon Johnson, in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, could extract those from an overwhelmingly Democratic House and Senate. But lesser steps—a renewed ban on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips, a requirement for background checks of buyers at gun shows, and the appointment, after six years of Republican obstruction, of a director for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—are, for the first time in nearly a generation, imaginable. 

There is, for the moment, a perceptible change in the weather. Even a change in the climate, though, may not be enough. Separating the Gohmerts from the mass of less fanatical devotees of “gun rights” will be necessary but not sufficient. The same is true of “Presidential leadership,” desirable though it is. America is alone among the advanced democracies of the world in suffering from an unending epidemic of gun mayhem. Are our politicians so much more cowardly, our legislators so much more corruptible than theirs? Or is our creaking, clanking political and governmental machinery so clogged with perverse incentives and exploitable bottlenecks that getting anything done requires our elected leaders to be more courageous (and our citizens more engaged) than theirs ever have to be? 

In the Congress of the United States, the odds are always stacked against success. Encouraged by a Supreme Court that has, in effect, abolished the “well regulated militia” clause of the Second Amendment, Republican leaders—who retain control of the House of Representatives despite their candidates’ having polled a million fewer votes than their Democratic opponents and who, though a Senate minority, can wield the stopping power of the filibuster—have scarcely wavered in their opposition to anything beyond bromides about violent movies and mental health. But even if the effort to curb the killing fails, as it may, or falls short, as it surely will, it is worth making. And Barack Obama, who responded to the massacre of the children of Sandy Hook first as a parent and then as a President, can at least be a prophet. ♦

Professor 

WR 135 

04.27.2015

Response “Stand Your Ground, Be a Man”

The article stand your ground be a man by “Stanley fish” says that a man should stand by his principles and follow what a man should do to guard his home. It is a declaration that a man should be at his home whenever he feels like as long as it is lawfully his. Primarily this law symbolizes the character of a man on handling of issues that concern a range of issues discussed by ‘’ fish’’ the author. Retreating is an issue raised here thus elaborates a prudent man should not retreat from nay violence and face it with maximum solidarity. Majorly the author’s position is the indemnity of law and how it relates with the understanding of how men deal with growing  problems. 

Notably, as the author notes that the opposite of standing your ground is to retreat, that’s not the case for a man because in many federal states the rule still is that, you retreat when there is an avenue to do go ahead before resorting into a deadly force. In that a home is a place that you ought to be regardless of any time.  “Stand your ground” is more than a declaration of a right of a man; In this case the implication is that the affirmation of a code of manliness links to the representations of the old west. Arguably in most western nations the plot pits forces of civilization, represented by the agricultural activities of the homesteaders represented by the ranch Ryker is a lawyer by profession. For example the conflict is emblematized both physically and metonymically where the man holds a gun on the other hand and the woman on the other hand. More profoundly this genre generates a lot of debate and on the potential altercations on the Stand Your Ground Laws. What is your response?

On conclusion “Stand Your Ground Be a Man” is a debatable law that involves doctrines of humanity and thus expanding on the issues of concern on matters regarding the laws. In this matter a man should not retaliate on ground s of violence and in respect deal with it profoundly. The growth of civilization has brought the rationales for violence and more westerners are self elegiac. The Florida Stand Your Ground law is frequently portrayed as an extension of the respected doctrines. In regard   a man’s home is his castle and he is warranted in prevent intruders with force if necessary  but, as critics have observed it may be more precise to see the return to the modern American landscape of the “shoot first” ethic of the old west as experienced or witnessed in dozens of movies. It is therefore exemplified on the issues raised should be a subject of discussion to allow ideology on the federal law that there must cautious steps in dealing with such growing tendencies. Generally the author brings forward the principle that should guide the man on how to handle critical issues and formulate on a policies that should work.

I am not sure I follow your points here.

The Introduction has key points of the article, which is good, even with some confusion. However, the rest does not show any response to the points made in the article. Since, you have missed many class sessions, you have missed response practice in class. 

MLA: 0.8 out of 0.8

Response: 4.5 out of 7.2

Grade: 5.3 out of 8