Saunders: Everyone at last weeks neighborhood association meeting

Saunders: Everyone at last week’s neighborhood association meeting agreed that the row of abandoned and vandalized houses on Carlton Street posed a threat to the safety of our neighborhood. Moreover, no one now disputes that getting the houses torn down eliminated that threat. Some people tried to argue that it was unnecessary to demolish what they claimed were basically sound buildings, since the city had established a fund to help people in need of housing buy and rehabilitate such buildings. The overwhelming success of the demolition strategy, however, proves that the majority, who favored demolition, were right and that those who claimed that the problem could and should be solved by rehabilitating the houses were wrong.

Saunders’ reasoning is flawed because it

(A) relies on fear rather than on argument to persuade the neighborhood association to reject the policy advocated by Saunders’ opponents

(B) fails to establish that there is anyone who could qualify for city funds who would be interested in buying and rehabilitating the houses

(C) mistakenly equates an absence of vocal public dissent with the presence of universal public support

(D) offers no evidence that the policy advocated by Saunders’ opponents would not have succeeded if it had been given the chance

(E) does not specify the precise nature of the threat to neighborhood safety supposedly posed by the vandalized houses

LSAT Prep Test 8­