Discourse Community – Gun Control/Rights
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Final Draft, Paper #1
James Taliano
jtaliano@student.govst.edu
Discourse Community – Gun Control/Rights
What is a discourse community, and why is it important? This is a very important
platform which is a collective number of people who discuss important topics at hand. Don’t get
me wrong, there can be discourse communities whose topic is something that has nothing to do
with politics, rules, laws, or anything of sustenance to a lot of people, and could be about
different gaming platforms. The best way to give a description of what a discourse community
is, is to take a direct quote from a linguist John Swales, whom defined discourse communities as
“groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals”. We will be
focusing on ‘Gun Control/Rights’ and how different, yet similar each of these communities are
within this topic.
There really aren’t any type of ‘typical participants’ in these types of
groups/communities. Since, these groups are online based, anyone can join into the topic or
topics that are being discussed. Now, primarily you will see people on both extremes that are
actively participating in these discussions. What I mean by extremes is, the people who are
either extremely for gun owner rights and the right to bear arms, or the ones that are extremely
against guns being carried or owned by citizens. But typically, you would see a wide variety of
people that jump in to these discussions, and for a variety of different reasons. Some people
could care either way about the gun control or gun rights, but the topic at hand could pique
interest in something that they believe in, so they comment or jump into the discussion on it.
Others could jump on because they want to know more about it and want to ask questions, or
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make comments to see how the thought process takes place for either side. These are just two
examples for an understanding that there really is not any typical type of participant that you
would find in these groups or communities.
The personality and/or interests that seem to make someone successful in this type of
group, is very hard to answer specifically because of a lot of variables. For example, extremists
as I stated earlier will be the most active in these groups or communities and stating that, they
would be more successful with making their points or opinions known. But, are they just
pushing their opinions and views or are there facts that back up the opinion? Just because
someone is very opinionated about the topic of discussion at hand, doesn’t mean everything that
they say is true or proven. Also, these ‘extremists’ are usually the easiest ones to trigger more of
a ‘bashing’ type of conversation. If an extremist from the opposite spectrum joins in on the
topic, then this makes both less successful because they start ‘ripping’ into each other instead of
staying in on the topic at hand. The other downfall are the ones that just post links for their
‘facts’ without doing their due diligence and researching if that site, article, video, person is
referencing how they got their information, because for all we know the reference they are using
could be one of the ‘extremists’ on either side of the discussion just pushing their opinions
without any intellectual sustenance to the point. However, if I were to answer this question in
my opinion, I would state that the best personality or interests to make someone more successful
in these groups, would be a person that is either right in the middle of being on either side of the
discussion or leaning slightly one way or the other. Someone who can keep their cool, knows
how to discuss and debate a topic intellectually and doesn’t allow emotion to become involved
while participating in the topic.
If a person or participant was asked to adopt a persona, it would be that of someone
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whom is calm, collected, adaptive, someone that can intelligently talk about a topic without
getting emotional. The ability to prove your responses, or prove your statements with a credible
source. However, this is the ‘ideal’ persona for these types of groups or communities. The
persona you normally get is one of pure emotion because of their belief, and rhetoric from the
participant. Usually there is always some sort of ‘detour’ in the conversation where you get
groups of the extremely opinionated switching from the topic to aggressively bashing each other
in the forum.
In order for participants in these type of discourse communities to work effectively, they
should know the same rules or guidelines that I described for ‘personas asked to adopt’ response
earlier in this writing. To effectively be a part of these communities the participants should be
able to keep a level head, be able to debate without emotion. They should be able to actively
research topics on their own and be able to tell viable and reliable sources before referencing
them within the discussion. The main reason for all of this, besides it being the best way for
your writing to be accepted into the discussion, is also because you must follow the discussions
rules. Some discussions have rules and regulations to your talks, i.e. if it becomes an attacking
type of discussion, where it is participants bashing participants, everything could end up being
deleted and/or you could be blocked from the discussion. So, it is important to be able to debate
and discuss and remain on topic.
There really is no depth of knowledge required to be a part of the discussion or at least a
part of the group. As I stated earlier some join in to these groups or communities to learn more
themselves about the topics. However, if you are going to participate and give responses to the
questions or topics being discussed, it is important that you at least have a general knowledge
about the topic at hand. You can do this by doing some simple researching on your own, and
Discourse Community – Gun Control/Rights
researching the resource to make sure it is a reliable one and they back up their writing with
references of their own.
The topics that are appropriate to discuss are any that are based within the realm of the
topic of the community. As far as gun control and gun rights, anything is appropriate to discuss
if the question or topic is open for discussion and is not a simple closed statement or opinion.
For example, a good topic would be ‘What changes in law would appease both gun control
activists and gun rights activists?’. As you can see this is a very broad and open-ended
discussion for both sides to participate in, and allow both sides to speak based on their research
and views on the topic. Whereas a topic, ‘Guns should not be owned by any citizens’ or ‘Every
citizen should have a gun’. Although these could be topics of debatable discussion, they are
more geared to the extremists on either side and will more than likely end up in being more of a
