Amidst the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting, a group of students founded the March For Our Lives (MFOL) movement, an advocacy campaign calling for legislation to protect the lives of schoolchildren against individuals who threaten the safety of elementary, middle, and high schools. Using the criteria for logical reasoning discussed in class, I observed three significant attributes that the site’s arguments contained.
The first is the frequency of the word “Congress” throughout the content of the site. In order to support the cause, MFOL identifies several congressmen who appear to benefit from the NRA and establishes credibility by reporting these men’s political background and policies. I felt, however, that MFOL’s reasoning was plagued by an ad hominem fallacy, in which the writers of the site content expressed their disdain for these politicians like a “witch hunt” and pulled quotations from the congressmen out of context in order to put them in a negative light.
I noticed also that there appeared to be a lack of citations and written sources in the site content, especially in the Frequently Asked Questions section. As a result, I observed that MLOF used a series of absolutes or general statements that muddied the clarity of their statistics and numerical data: they argued, for instance, that the ATF is the only federal agency with the jurisdiction to regulate the gun industry, without specifying whether or not other organizations have the ability to indirectly influence gun-related legislation in Congress. MLOF advances the specific argument that the ATF must become “modernized,” yet there is little data on the website to back up such claim; MLOF could establish greater logical appeals on the website by presenting survey results or statistics on the congressional votes in regard to the agency.
Lastly, MLOF seemed not to address a reasonable, credible, and relevant counterargument. In particular, the website began to develop a straw man fallacy in which they refuted claims unrelated to their actual opponents: they argued that military weapons have no place in American communities, although the real argument of their opponents is that student shooters can have access to both military-grade and non-military-grade equipment and firearms.
MLOF’s website was visually appealing and the information was presented concisely and clearly. Nevertheless, the arguments presented by the organization seemed pathos-heavy and would not sound credible to a member of the NRA, their supposed target audience, who would read the site content as a mere regurgitation of gun facts and observations that lack credible sources. As this movement was largely student-run in the beginning phases, I am intrigued at the direction it will head in the future and hope that legislative reform will decrease the number of school shootings in the country—although I believe that MLOF missed a core argument revolving around how a student’s home environment is supremely influential and affects his or her attitude on classmates, teachers, and schooling.