Nicolas Kristof's Rhetorical Devices In Our Blind Spot About Guns

Nicolas Kristof uses many rhetorical devices to make points in his piece titled, Our Blind Spot about Guns. He compares the attributes of gun safety to the attributes of car safety and attempts to make a point that the government should regulate guns in the same way cars are regulated
In this piece, Kristof tries to convince the reader that regulating guns, the same way cars are regulated, will an effective way to decrease the amount of deaths by guns every year. In the beginning of his writing, he lays out a factual calculation of how many Americans died annually before cars were regulated (161). He then uses a rhetorical device called an analogy when he states, “Yet, instead, we built a system that protects us from ourselves. This saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year and is a model of what we should do with guns in America” (161). Kristof is saying that we should regulate guns in the same way we regulate cars and that will protect us from ourselves. He uses this device to give the reader an idea of what the result of regulating guns like cars would be.

Kristof uses this device when he replies to comments like, “Cars don’t kill people, people kill people” (161). Kristof makes a point when he says, “The truth is that we regulate cars quite intelligently, instituting evidence-based measures to reduce fatalities” (161). He is stating that if we were to set up an institution to regulate guns like cars, the the statement that “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” (161), would then be true. He uses this to support his argument that if the government would regulate guns as intelligently as they regulate cars, they could possibly have the same positive