Logic Argument, Essay Example

The article argues that the wide-scale response of the government to the events of 9/11 was over reaction because even though the number of lost lives was significant, a far greater number of lives are lost in automobile accidents and homicides and yet they do not attract the response at the same level from the government. The article errs in understanding the reasons behind government reaction to 9-11 events because even though protecting the lives of U.S citizens has always been the government’s priority, the scale of response could not have been this huge if just protecting lives was the sole mission. 9-11 events triggered a huge scale response because of the potential of such events to significantly derail the economy. If the terrorists’ aim was maximum life causalities, they could have chosen many other targets within the U.S. The reason they struck Twin Towers was to inflict severe blow to the U.S. economy and undermine global community’s confidence in the internal security of the U.S. The threat of economic meltdown was so real that the Fed was forced to assure the market that it stands ready to inject liquidity. The loss of lives in automobile accidents and homicides is indeed sad but it doesn’t cause damage to the U.S. economy that an incident of 9-11’s nature is capable of. The article does mention that airlines almost went bankrupt and Fed was forced to keep them afloat. Thus, the argument is deductively weak. In addition, the premises are difficult to prove because as the authors point out, there are other causes which result in greater number of deaths yet they don’t trigger the same response by the government.

The second argument presented in the article that merits response is that the public overreacted in terms of fear and panic to 9-11 because it was attack by foreign terrorists. This is inductively weak argument because the public didn’t react as it did just because it was an attack by foreign terrorists but because of the number of lives lost in a single event. The public has also been known to overreact to relatively minor events such as school shoot downs even though the shooters are local.

The authors also wonder why the public overreacted to 9-11 but doesn’t overreact to annual automobile accidents’ or homicides’ figures. The reason the public doesn’t react as aggressively to loss of lives in automobile accidents or homicides is because the total tally comes from hundreds or maybe thousands of accidents instead of a single event. Each fatal accident on the average may involve only few deaths at the maximum. The loss of three thousand people on the eve of 9-11 happened on a single event. Thus, it was the sheer size of a single event to which public reacted which would still have happened, were the perpetrators local.