In John Wilson's essay, "Just take their guns away", Wilson tries to persuade his reader that the solution to our gun problem is not to disarm law-abiding citizens, but to reduce the number of guns carried unlawfully by means of street frisks. He disagrees with liberals who believe that more gun control in the form of legal restraints on the lawful purchase of guns is the solution. He also points out that tougher punishments for gun crimes, which are advocated by right wing organizations like the National Rifle Association, are rarely enforced. He believes the best answer would be to impose more street frisks on people who we can reasonably suspect of carrying illegal firearms. In Wilson's essay, he builds a poor argument by means of unacceptable examples and statistics. .
In Wilson's essay, he speaks in an intelligent and confident tone hoping the reader will accept many of his unexplained statistics. In the seventh paragraph Wilson proclaims the police arrest four times as many people drunk on the street than people carrying guns unlawfully. This statistic is not cited and may or may not be reasonable. If there are more drunks on the street than armed criminals, and drunks are much easier to spot than illegal gun carriers, then of course more drunks would be arrested.
A statistic Wilson uses in paragraph three is much worse. A criminologist "estimated"(105) that guns were displayed or fired over a million times in a year. Estimations, however, are not always accurate, Wilson even states, "If his estimate is correct" (105). The estimate is derived from surveys where people self-report that they intimidated or scared off a criminal. The people who were surveyed might be rationalizing or defending their right to posses a weapon. This does not leave the reader with enough confidence to regard this point as even relevant. In paragraph ten, Wilson again uses unknown statistics for facts that need to be grounded, "The available evidence supports the claim that self-defense is a legitimate form of deterrence"(106).
