I’ve decided to analyze the National Rifle Association’s website because, lightly stated, I think it could use some work. In regards to logical appeals, there are a lot of “logical” arguments made for why American citizens need to own rifles. They reference the 2nd amendment religiously, and talk through the history of how the NRA was founded.
Something that could be seen as a “smart move” by the website was deciding to provide links to many other websites so that people could educate themselves from actually legitimate sources rather than the biased opinions found on the NRA’s official website.
Another logical appeal is the argument that owning a gun will protect you. The website refers to this as “lawful self defense” but fails to back up this frequently used phrase. I would’ve loved to see some statistics to back up this statement or at least a derivation of where this term stems from, but the NRA does not actually advance this argument beyond one or two sentences.
In all honestly, the only statistics I found that didn’t use blanket statements and lack actual data to back it up, was that approximately 74 million Americans identify as disabled. This may seem completely random, but this number was given in reference to a program dedicated to allowing shooting ranges to adapt to all people.
The website does not explain why they implemented this program or even why it would be beneficial to disabled Americans to practice in a shooting range. The fact that the only numerical data this website offers was only to list the number of disabled people in America and not even the number of disabled Americans interested or currently utilizing these adaptive shooting ranges makes the data seem irrelevant and it makes no effort to go into depth on how this program works, making it seem underdeveloped just like many of the arguments on this site.