Columnist Reading Log by Frank Rich
Essay Preview: Columnist Reading Log by Frank Rich
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Frank Rich is a writer for the New York Magazine, he writes every week about a political or social issue affecting the United States and its people. His articles are mainly geared towards the middle aged group of people but also knowledge seekers who wish to learn more about occurring issues that may have an impact on their life. In this weeks article Rich writes about how with people allowed to carry guns in their homes it is causing a lot of issues with the lives of the poor innocent people who do not wish to carry dangerous tools. He believes that this is a very serious issue and that people should be more careful and only use their weapons when necessary otherwise it could, and has caused a lot of harm to people who never wished to be a part of violent acts. “The first step on the long path to curing a deep illness in a society is to diagnose it properly and own up to it. We must acknowledge that guns and violence are not some new “modern” problem subject to a quick fix.” He talks about violent videogames and talks specifically about the effects of guns on people. “On ABCs This Week yesterday, one proponent, writer Joe Klein, did have an action plan: “What we need to do in this society is treat people who create violent movies and violent video games with the same degree of respect that we accord pornographers. They need to be shunned.” He blames the videogamers and the movie makers for all of this violence making the robbers think it is okay to do all of this stuff. Now normally a writer likes to take the audience on a rollercoaster and at the end tell them everything they believe, but in this writers case he starts off giving his opinion and stays with his opinion throughout the entire article giving very detailed information on why he is correct. He blames these people throughout most of his article, “Even if you are certain that violent entertainment and video games trigger violence in crazy people — a debatable proposition empirically — and even if you believe there should be First Amendment abridgments to regulate cultural violence, who should we put in charge of censoring the culture in a way that might be sane and effective? Congress? The entertainment industry? The Simpson-Bowles commission?” And as usual he cant end his article without in some way blaming all of the issues on Romney and the GOP, “Guns — like another looming disaster, climate change — were off the table in the election for the Democrats, for the usual cynical political reasons. (Romney, of course, disdained gun regulation.) Obama has hardly been a leader on this issue over the past eight years.”
Throughout his article Rich uses a variety of rhetorical devices and techniques to intrigue the audience and mentally persuade them to think like him. Rich uses parallelism in his article to show the reader that this gun issue has become more severe than what it may seem like, he uses a connection