The main problem in O’Meara’s argument lies with the types of evidence used to support his case for gun education. He imagines a hypothetical scenario where high schools would have access to a “firing range” and where students could practice shooting a “target” while being supervised by adult “trainers” (para. 10). This scenario has its shortcomings: there are no details about how the “trainers” would actually teach their students, other than by “watching” and pointing out “potential problems” (para. 10). The description of gun classes as “lengthy periods of time” is also vague; it could mean anything from an hour to an entire afternoon. O’Meara would probably be able to find more concrete details had he consulted some scholarly research on…show more content… One of his main arguments for gun education is that the merely physical act of holding and firing a gun is the only experience a young person needs to get over the glamour of gun violence. His evidence for this point is entirely personal and subjective: he narrates the childhood experience of playing with a friend’s “9-mm military-issue Browning semi-automatic” (para. 2) and randomly shooting “fifty rounds” (para. 3). It is nice to know that, for O’Meara, guns quickly became “boring” (para. 4) after this particular experience, but it is important to remember that this is only his experience, not one that could be easily generalized for all youth, especially in a country that is as diverse as Canada. I find it hard to assume that guns could become this easily de-mystified for youth in impoverished, urban communities, where guns can be a means of power for survival. I’m also not sure that young girls develop the same Hollywood fantasies about guns and therefore need to have them de-mystified so that they won’t pick one up and start firing away randomly.
Having said all of this, the one strong piece of evidence in “Guns, Sex and Education” is with O’Meara’s response to the counterargument, where he points out to the violent incidents in “Taber, Alberta” and “Toronto” (para. 9). This justifies the necessity of taking action in Canada, be it through a gun education program as O’Meara envisions or something else. Some more historical
