All citizens who have not committed a crime should have the right to purchase a gun.

OK, so running off of your 1st speech, it seems clear that this is going to be a positive/ negative impact debate. To clarify, whoever can make the best argument towards good things that will happen if they win, and/or bad things that will happen if their opponent wins, will be the victor. Fair enough? Next, as the con, I am advocating for a system that would not allow citizens to own guns. So your biggest negative impact is that criminals will get a leg up and hurt helpless citizens. To minimize that impact I provide 3 rational. 1) Most Americans do not own a gun; therefore, the number of citizens that will be defenseless will not increase dramatically. 2) It will still be harder for criminals to own guns, they'd have to get it from a black market. As with any black market, it will be unreliable, and the merchandise will be far more expensive. Most criminals have very little money, so there are several reasons why the number of criminals with guns will actually decrease from the status quo. 3) As I am only advocating for CITIZENS not owning guns, it is safe to assume that on duty police officers will have firearms, and will provide as the defense for the "defenseless". Your next impact is a question, not an argument, but I'll show its insignificance anyway. You provide no warrant, rationale, or precedence in which a citizen has been attacked by their government, mush less needed a gun to defend themselves. The only citizens that would normally be attacked by the government are law- breakers, which flows into my argument #3 on your 1st point. So, at this point, I have made it clear why the bad things he said are not likely to happen, and why we shouldn't vote pro, I'll tell you why we should vote con. To do this I will use a series of negative impacts like my opponent, only I intend to support them with rationale and/or evidence. Point 1: Do you like children? I know I do, I believe that children are our future, they are a good thing to strive to protect. Well, a Harvard University Study published in the February 2002 issue of The Journal of Trauma, shows that children living in the five states with the highest levels of gun ownership were 16 times more likely to die from unintentional firearm injury, seven times more likely to die from firearm suicide, and three times more likely to die from firearm homicide than children in states with the lower levels of gun ownership. Additionally, children in the top five gun ownership states were twice as likely to die from homicide and suicide overall. VPC Executive Director Josh Sugarmann states, "this study proves what common sense would dictate, a greater availability of guns has dangerous and deadly consequences. Firearms in the home pose an enormous threat to the well-being of our nation's children." Matthew Miller, MD, MPH, ScD, associate director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center at HSPH and lead author of the study, states, "In states with more guns, more children are dying. They are dying in suicides, in homicides, and in unintentional shootings. This finding is completely contrary to the notion that guns are protecting our children." The availability of guns has a direct effect on the number of children being killed with guns. That's a good reason to vote con. Point 2: Since we are clearly valuing the protection of citizens, domestic violence also increases due to firearm availability. The results from a Multi-Site Case Control Study by J. C. Campbell, D; Webster, J; Koziol-McLain, C., as published in American Journal of Public Health show: "Access to firearms increases the risk of intimate partner homicide more than five times more than in instances where there are no forearms. In addition, abusers who possess guns tend to inflict the most severe abuse on their partners." Because firearm availability increases domestic fatalities, more citizens, in this case women are harmed by the presence of firearms. Under this same argument, to preempt the argument that women could use guns to defend themselves, I turn to the article A Deadly Myth: Women, Handguns, and Self-Defense. (2001): "In 1998, for every one woman who used a handgun to kill an intimate acquaintance in self- defense, 83 women were murdered by an intimate acquaintance using a handgun." It is clear that domestic violence and deaths will increase due to domestically owned guns, a severe negative impact is placed on the pro's goal of protecting citizens. Point 3: The ownership of a firearm is actually more likely to make you a victim of homocide. According to the findings from a recent case-control study (Kellermann et al. 1993) were interpreted as indicating that "persons who lived in households with guns were 2.7 times as likely to become homicide victims as persons in households without guns." An article published by the Harvard School for Public Health called "Firearm availability and homicide". "The research suggests that households with firearms are at higher risk for homicide, and there is no net beneficial effect of firearm ownership. No longitudinal cohort study seems to have investigated the association between a gun in the home and homicide. Two groups of ecological studies are reviewed, those comparing multiple countries and those focused solely on the United States. Results from the cross-sectional international studies typically show that in high-income countries with more firearms, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide." Owning a gun actually statistically increases the harm that will be done to you, this directly opposes the pro's value of citizen protection because the ownership of guns does directly the opposite. Point 4: The availability of firearms increases suicides. According to a study and case review done by: Vladeta Ajdacic-Gross, PhO; IVIartin Killias, PhD; Urs Hepp, MD; Erika Gadola, MA; Matthias Bopp, PhD; Christoph Lauber, MD; Ulrich Schnyder, MD; Felix Gutzwiller, MD; DrPH, and Wulf Rossler, MD, MA. "This result is in line with the well-established association between availability of firearms at home and risk of firearm suicide.' Firearm suicides depend on the availability of the method more than other suicide methods. Firearm suicides result more often fixed impulsive decisions than other suicide methods and tend to be associated more often with alcohol abuse." Victims of firearm suicides were shown to have distinctly fewer previous suicide attempts (22%) in their psychiatric history than were victims of other suicide methods (360/0-70%). Furthermore, firearms are more lethal than most other suicide methods." Increases in suicide rates are directly related to the availability of firearms, and these suicides are exclusive to firearms. This is another reason that the private ownership of firearms harms individual citizens that the pro was trying to protect. Summary: I have given 4 main points that show conclusively that citizens are harmed by firearms, more than they could be helped by using them for self- defense. I have given piles of creditable evidence to support each and every claim I make, something that my opponent fails to do. We are both valuing the protection of citizens, that's why he's saying we must have private ownership, that's why I'm saying we shouldn't. If a single one of my points stands in this round, we should vote con. As a final note, I challenge my opponent to retrieve evidence that is not from or derived from the research conducted by the NRA. The NRA has a direct economic incentive to produce false evidence, and I claim that they have done so on several occasions. They are a tainted source and should not be used in this debate.