Fire v.s. bsh: In the United States, private ownership of handguns ought to be banned.

Thanks, Fire. Onto my case.FRAMEWORKCon drops my two justifications for consequentialism (conseq.). Extend them. You should buy into conseq. because (a) it is more appropriate for government actors, and (b) other theories default to conseq. when they reach logjams.Con's only reply to my framework is to quote Socrates. This is a blatant "appeal to authority" fallacy. Just because (b/c) Socrates says something is true doesn't make it true. People like St. Augustine say that a just law is no law at all, a concept others (e.g. MLK, Gandhi) bought into. [1] These authorities cancel out. My logical justifications should trump Con's bare assertion.PLANA. TurnAgain, if we're talking about what can realistically happen in the U.S., then Con's plan should be dismissed. The NRA will oppose all further gun control legislation as it has in the past. Con is in a double-bind: either he scraps his license idea b/c it cannot happen, or he stops caring about what can feasibly occur. He cannot have it both ways.B. There are issues with Con's plan itselfB1. Con should not be allowed to make any changes to his plan (deletions, additions, or modifications of any kind) b/c, given the structure of the debate, I would have no opportunity to reply to this switch and it would constitute a "shifting the goalposts" fallacy. Con's plan is proposing that Icelandic-style licenses for gun ownership be introduced in the U.S. In Iceland, to get a license, you must (1) undergo gun training/pass a test certifying that you learned how to handle a gun, (2) pass a background check, and (3) pass a mental health exam. [2, 3] Nothing in Con's plan-text or inherent to Iceland's license model includes safe storage laws.B2. Firstly, Con's plan does not include safe storage laws, which require that guns be stored in such a way that they are inaccessible to children or guests. Thus, child-related accidental deaths will likely continue to be unnecessarily high. Secondly, background checks are less effective at preventing gun violence than gun bans. A meta-analysis of 47 other studies found that the r value (representing the correlation between the regulatory policy and gun violence) of background checks/waiting period was -.78 among all studies, and -.004 among high quality studies, compared to the r value of a weapons ban, which was -.194 among all studies, and -.207 among high quality studies. The means that a ban is roughly 52x better at preventing gun violence than a background check, according to the high quality studies surveyed, and 2.5x better according to all studies. [4] Thirdly, training doesn't necessarily mean you can use the gun well. Consider that, as I showed in a previous round, "77 percent of shots fired in self-defense situations will miss their targets, even when fired by trained gun-handlers." Finally, background and mental health checks will never perfectly screen everyone, and not all criminals or the mentally ill have previous records or readily identifiable symptoms. Many will only become criminals or become ill after they make their gun purchase. Many criminals in the US won't bother trying to get the license, and will simply get their guns off the blackmarket. I reduce the blackmarket supply; thus I reduce the likelihood that they can get or afford a gun illegally. More expensive illegal guns (Con says illegal guns will be costlier) will price many people out of the illegal market altogether, denying them access to illegal guns. Ergo, a ban is the most surefire way to keep guns out of the hands of those who shouldn't have them. ARGUMENTSI. Guns Overabundance is a ProblemA. SuicidesCon asks, if people want to die, who are we to stop them? Con misses, however, a key element of my original argument, i.e. that 80% of suicides are impulsive acts, meaning that they are not thought through. Furthermore (from R2, source 5), 90% of people who survive suicide attempts choose not to kill themselves later, reflecting "the 'temporary nature and fleeting sway of many suicidal crises.'" Most people "overwhelmingly regret" their decisions to attempt to take their own lives, and many others engage in these attempts due to (often treatable) mental illness, rather than as a result of any sane deliberation. [5]The impact of this is clear: people are ending their lives and denying themselves a future based on rash, ill-considered decisions heavily skewed by momentary stresses. They aren't thinking clearly. Others try to kill themselves due to mental illness, which could be managed properly if they got the right help. We should not allow people to commit suicide in this way, as it leads to (1) tragic deaths which could've been avoided, (2) wasted futures of people who could've lived happy lives, and (3) scarred loved ones. Just b/c someone wants to kill themselves in the short term doesn't mean, if you let them cool down, that they will want to kill themselves in the long term. Removing guns from the equation prevents fatal decisions being made rashly by distressed or desperate people.B. Accidental DeathsCon says that not all things that lead to accidental deaths should be banned, giving the example of cars. Sure, cars shouldn't be banned as their benefits outweigh their costs. Without cars, our economy would cease to function (harder goods shipment, preventing people getting to work, etc.), leading to far greater woes for everyone. However, if the costs of the accidental deaths are not outweighed by the benefits of something, there is no reason to allow people to die from it. It is when the costs are more than the benefits that something should be banned.Con claims that his benefits (e.g. self-defense) outweigh the costs. But this is, frankly, wrong. I've taken apart his self-defense argument already. But, even if you don't buy my arguments against self-defense, the lives lost due accidental deaths, homicides, and suicides actually outweigh the lives saved by self-defense. As my source showed earlier (Con never rebutted/conceded this): "This implies that for every case where someone in a gun-owning house hold uses a gun to successfully stop a life-threatening attack, nearly forty-three people in similar households will die from a gunshot."Therefore, this argument impacts as a cost against allowing the sale of handguns on a conseq. scale. Con never disagrees (concedes) that accidental deaths happen at inordinately high rates due to gun prevalence.C. Anti-DeterrenceCon says my source is too old. I used 2 sources to substantiate the claim that guns were magnets for criminals. One of those sources was from 2003; one was from 2015. Even if you don't buy my first source because it's older, you should buy my second source because it's only a year old. Thus, this argument can be extended because it still has an unrebutted source supporting it.I used another source to back the claim that possessing guns gives people a false sense of empowerment. This research is psychological; it is highly unlikely that human psychology would have changed drastically in the past 6-7 years. Even logic tells us that this evidence makes sense now: if guns make you feel safe, you'd probably be more willing to take risks with the guns due to that false sense of security. Pew data from 2013 shows that large numbers of gun owners or people who know someone who own a gun (79 and 64%, respectively) say that guns make them feel safer. [6] This recent data corroborates the point of the 2009 article and the logic I provided re: the false sense of security. Also, as a further impact, the 2009 article states: "those with firearms were about 4.5 times more likely to be shot than those who did not carry."Con's claim that anyone can edit the content in my sources is literally false. Which article is Con talking about? None of them can be edited by just anyone. Literally none of these institutions (NIH, The Guardian, or NBER) allow you to log in to edit or add content. As far as I can tell, only the NIH allows you to create an account, but it is basically a research help tool, not a document editor. [7] If Con is talking about adding comments to the bottom of the article for the newspaper, that is totally different from being able to mess with the article itself. Finally, my argument that guns make moments of rage more likely to turn lethal is not a bare assertion. Logic is a sufficient warrant to a claim. Not every argument needs to be sourced; certainly, Con does not source all his arguments, but instead employs logic, showing that he implicitly agrees with this reality.D. ViolenceCon's only reply here is his plan; yet, Con's plan has myriad problems that make it ineffective at preventing violence or accidents. II. Bans WorkA. HandgunsCon agrees with my data. The point is that handguns most need to be restricted, b/c they are the guns most used to commit crimes. Handguns have advantages--like concealability and ease of storage--that larger guns lack, meaning things like rifles won't be effectively substituted in.B. AustraliaAustralia and the U.S may have different rates but both are in the top 26 in terms of guns per capita; we're still talking about huge numbers of guns that needed to be collected. In Australia, with it's rural outback, it may have been even harder to collect those guns than it would be here, but it still managed to do so. Plus, Australia and the U.S share a frontier culture that has long emphasized the importance of gun ownership. Both have larger rural populations and share similar media diets. They also share large numbers of gun enthusiasts. [8] These cultural similarities make them good comparisons.SOURCES1 - http://tinyurl.com...2 - http://tinyurl.com...3 - http://tinyurl.com...4 - http://tinyurl.com...5 - http://tinyurl.com...6 - http://tinyurl.com...7 - http://tinyurl.com...8 - http://tinyurl.com...Thus, I affirm. Thanks; please Vote Pro! Over to Fire...