Banning all firearms in the US would be detrimental to society

Good luck to my opponent in his first debate on this site!As clarified in the comments section, I'll be using this round to present my opening argument.For this debate, I'll only present a single contention against the resolution -- that banning firearms would significantly reduce homicides in the US, and therefore be decidedly beneficial to society.Let's start with some general statistics: in the United States, the country with the highest rate of legal gun ownership on the planet, 67% of homicides are committed using a firearm [1]. This fact alone makes it highly unlikely that access to guns has no effect on homicide rates, because such a claim relies on the ludicrous assumption that if guns were not available, *all* of those murderers would simply switch to other weapons in order to commit their crimes. This view is absurd because if it were true, other developed nations with low rates of gun ownership would still have very similar homicide rates to ours, yet this is far from being the case [2]: It is evident that on average, countries with low gun ownership don't have *nearly* the amount of homicides that the US has. So we can conclude that murderers do *not* just switch to other weapons when guns aren't available. In other words, guns facilitate violence in a way that no other weapon does. Guns provide a relatively quick, easy, and detached (compared to stabbing or beating someone to death) way to kill, which means that the presence of firearms makes it much easier for tense situations (e.g. heated arguments, robberies, accidental trespassing, domestic abuse, street fights, road rage, etc) to escalate into fatal encounters. This has especially big implications considering that 79% of homicides in the US occur between family, friends, and acquaintances [3], 60% of homicides occur at the victim's home [4], and almost 40% of homicides stem from mere *arguments* [5]. This shows that the majority of homicides are impulsive in nature and occur in domestic settings-- they would most likely not have happened had there not been any convenient access to lethal force (i.e. guns).So on the basis of a few objective facts and some theoretical reasoning, it can be concluded that allowing civilian gun ownership is responsible for a substantial portion of homicides in society. But that's not all -- the conclusion that guns facilitate violence is corroborated by large number of professional statistical studies which do a much more thorough job of avoiding pitfalls such as faulty causation by controlling for various relevant external variables. Most of the following quotations either reference or come from peer-reviewed papers which were published in reputable journals:--- "Using a validated proxy for firearm ownership [survey data], we analyzed the relationship between firearm availability and homicide across 50 states over a ten year period (1988-1997). After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of homicide, particularly firearm homicide." [6][7]--- "Given the number of victims allegedly being saved with guns, it would seem natural to conclude that owning a gun substantially reduces your chances of being murdered. Yet a careful case-control study of homicide in the home found that a gun in the home was associated with an increased rather than a reduced risk of homicide. Virtually all of this risk involved homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.” [8].--- "This paper uses a unique data set [gun sales as a proxy for gun ownership rates] to demonstrate that increases in gun ownership lead to substantial increases in the overall homicide rate. This is driven entirely by a relationship between firearms and homicides in which a gun is used, implying that the results are not driven by reverse causation or by omitted variables. The relationship between changes in gun ownership and changes in all other crime categories is weaker and typically insignificant, suggesting that guns influence crime primarily by increasing the homicide rate." [9]--- "Studies [from the Violence Policy Center] show that the mere presence of firearms in [domestic violence] situations -- no matter who actually owns the firearms -- increases the risk of intimate partner homicide five times more than in instances where there are no weapons present." [10][11]--- "[A] study, by Professor Michael Siegel at Boston University and two coauthors, has been peer-reviewed and is forthcoming in the American Journal of Public Health. Siegel and his colleagues compiled data on firearm homicides from all 50 states from 1981-2010, the longest stretch of time ever studied in this fashion, and set about seeing whether they could find any relationship between changes in gun ownership and murder using guns over time.... 'age, gender, race/ethnicity, urbanization, poverty, unemployment, income, education, income inequality, divorce rate, alcohol use, violent crime rate, nonviolent crime rate, hate crime rate, number of hunting licenses, age-adjusted nonfirearm homicide rate, incarceration rate,and suicide rate' were all accounted for... The result was staggering: ...A one standard deviation change in firearm ownership shifted gun murders by a staggering 12.9 percent" [12].In conclusion, all lines of evidence examined thus far go overwhelmingly in support of the notion that allowing civilians to own guns leads to a significant increase in homicide rates. A ban on firearms would obviously result in a huge decrease in gun ownership, and by extension, a lot of lives being saved, thus rendering such a ban to be beneficial. The resolution is negated.SOURCES[1] http://en.wikipedia.org... (citation #2 has a link to a UNODC data table)[2] http://crimepreventionresearchcenter.org...[3] http://www.fbi.gov...[4] http://www.motherjones.com...[5] http://tinyurl.com... (books.google.com)[6] Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. Household firearm ownership levels and homicide rates across U.S. regions and states, 1988-1997.American Journal of Public Health. 2002: 92:1988-1993.[7] http://www.hsph.harvard.edu...[8] Arthur L. Kellermann et al., Gun Ownership As a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home, 329. New England Journal of Medicine. 1084, 1087 (1993)[9] https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu...[10] http://www.ncdsv.org...[11] J. C. Campbell, J.C.,Webster, D., Koziol-McLain, J. and et al. (2003). Risk Factors For Femicide in Abusive Relationships: Results From A Multi-Site Case Control Study. American Journal of Public Health. 93(7).[12] http://thinkprogress.org...