How Arthur Miller Relates to the Hate on Gun Rights

Gage Hunt

Mr. Fraser-Bumatay

Junior English

Nov 12, 2017

How Arthur Miller Relates to the Hate on Gun Rights

        A topic that poses a lot of controversy in our country today. There’s been a big uproar on gun rights the past few years, resulting in a lot of conflict. It’s gotten to a point where you could consider it a modern day “witch hunt”. In the Story, The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, he shows the most common ingredients to mass hysteria in modern-day “witch hunts”. Gun rights easily fits into the ingredients he shows such as, fear, ignorance, personal motives, and unfair treatment of the accused. These could easily be compared to gun rights and other issues that are happening in today’s society.

        First is Fear. Fear can cause people to act differently than they normally would, making it easier for them to cry witch. Arthur Miller shows a sign of fear through Elizabeth when he says, “The town has gone wild” (Elizabeth 52). Fear made people do things that they normally wouldn’t do or say things they normally wouldn’t say. When you are overcome with fear you realize you are only being manipulated to be punished and be misled by lies. Often, people would use fear to control someone to then use their fear to blame another person for witchcraft. This easily falls over to one of today’s modern-day witch hunts, gun rights. In the article Republic of Fear, describes modern America as a “kingdom of fear” and that there are “people out there who are determined to harm you, whether they are criminals or terrorists or the police” (32). This makes sense in that people are afraid of guns and we should only get rid of guns. This is wrong because if one person is determined enough to cause havoc on other people’s lives then they will do anything they can to make it happen. Banning guns completely would just cause more fear to the people that don’t feel comfortable or safe without a gun. How are those people supposed to protect themselves against someone else with a gun? It makes sense that Arthur Miller’s use of fear is relatable to the fear we see today in gun rights.

        Next after fear would be ignorance and illogical conclusions. There are plenty of ignorant things said about guns. These mostly coming from uninformed people that don’t know anything about guns. Arthur Miller shows illogical conclusions through Abigail when she confesses that she “Danced for the Devil; [she] saw him; [he] wrote in his book” (Abigail 48).  This is illogical because by Abigail admitting to witch craft and accusing others of being with the devil. Abigail is afraid of being punished, so in turn makes her act differently by then confessing to witchcraft. Illogical conclusions happen all the time when talking about gun rights. Just recently involving the Las Vegas shooting, Hillary Clinton tweeted a perfect example of illogical conclusion and ignorance. Later the night of the shooting, Hillary Clintons tweet was “the crowd fled to the sound of gunshots, imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer” (Clinton). This is ignorant considering families just lost loved ones and she’s taking to twitter thinking of how the massacre could’ve been much deadlier if silencers were used. She couldn’t keep politics out of the whole situation for at least 24 hours.