Citizens Should Be Permitted To Own Guns

"Basically my opponent is arguing that banning guns would not significantly prevent the deaths because there are other means. Here's the thing though, no one could go really far with a knife. It is really hard for me to kill a large aggregate of people with a knife, without someone taking away the knife. So after someone kills the first person some people will either run and he would have to catch each individual, or try to take the knife away. Point is, no massacre could occur. I don't anything like the Sandy hook elementary could occur."If you focus solely on mass killings, no doubt guns make it much harder to kill many more people. Australia saw hasn't seen much in the way of mass killings since they banned guns. However you must weigh the total extra people killed as a result of owning guns versus the total people who have been or could be saved by guns. Remember, our goal (should be) to reduce as many people killed as possible. Roughly 50 people are killed each year in mass shootings. Given the results of the Australian and British gun bans, the chances of there being a high rate of substitution for single killings is likely to be high. How many extra people die as a result of citizens owning guns? I don't think anyone has an exact answer to this, but there will be a high substitution rate so perhaps not too many. Nonetheless the Kleck Study estimated 162,000 people would have died had they not had a gun to defend themselves. No doubt this number is an overestimate, but even if only 10% of the cases were true, 16,000 people were saved by guns whereas at MOST around 11,000 people would be saved if we did not have guns (assuming the substitutions rate is 0). That means, if we're extremely generous, 5,000 less murders as a result of private firearm ownership. Also, the mass knifing sprees tend to discredit the deadliness of knives. The main reason those people don't tend to die is because they usually get immediate medical attention afterwards and the would-be killer isn't focusing on killing as much as stabbing as many people as possible. As far as using a knife to kill someone, they are still quite deadly. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 1,694 people were killed by knives in 2011. Gun AccidentsI'll concede that without guns we would not have any gun accidents, the increase in accidents in Australia was just a strange thing to occur and I figured earned merit. Gun SuicideJust to clarify, I actually do believe that a few less people would die from suicide without guns because, you're right, jumping off a building or hanging yourself is arguably scarier than shooting yourself. However the net effect would be small, and is outweighed by the extra people saved who defend themselves with guns. "...the argument is used that to protect yourself from people with guns you need guns, so the same could be used. To protect yourself from people with knives, you use knives."I would argue there is a flaw here in your logic. First I'll address this from the standpoint of someone who has taken a few years of martial arts training, and I'll qoute some statistics provided by John Lott in his book More Guns, Less CrimeThe goal of self-defense is to stop whatever the attacker may be doing to you while reducing the amount of personal injury you may perceive. Toward this goal, you want the utmost superiority of force. If someone is attacking you with a gun, obviously you would want a gun. If someone is attacking you with a knife or bat, you want to have a gun. If there are multiple attackers or if your opponent completely outclasses you in size and fighting skill, you want a gun. Why is this?If you try to defend yourself against someone who has a knife while using a knife, in my experience of fake knife fighting you have to be extremely skilled in order to be successful in this and, more than likely, both people will be cut and possibly die. At the very least both people will probably need medical attention, wheras if you had a gun and if your opponent did not you would not have been injured. From John Lott's book, he mentions that a Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey found that if someone is being robbed, women were were 4 times less likely to be seriously injured if they defended themselves with a gun instead of defending themselves by any other means, and they were 2.5 times less likely to be harmed if they defended themselves with a gun versus if they did nothing. Men also saw some benefits but not as high. Men were 1.5 times less likely to be injured if they defended themselves with a gun vs. if they defended themselves by any other means, and they were 1.4 times less likely to receive personal injury if they defended themselves with a gun instead of acting passively. In conclusion, its best to have a gun to defend yourself with. If you don't have a gun, act passively (just advice for anyone reading this). Australia/Britain RevisitedBritain was, for all intensive purposes, a complete and successful gun ban. Australia was not but it was close. The point of referencing these countries is to show that they drastically reduced the number of guns in their country, but the substitution rate for murdering someone with other means was extremely high. Given that Australians and Britains didn't use guns for self-defense nearly as often as American do, it is likely that we could see many more people killed if we completely banned guns. American Gun Crime and Self-Defense ReplyUnfortunately criminals don't act rationally as far as their victims are concerned. The rational thing to do, obviously, would be get their valuables and leave them alone. If they intended to kill you, rationally they would have done it right away and stolen your valuables off your corpse. But criminals aren't always rational, if they take your stuff without harming you they may still decide to kill you are injure you afterwards. Ultimately the means by which you are least likely to experience harm, as long as they already don't have a knife to your throat or a gun to your head, is to present a gun. When this happens, the most likely outcome is for the criminal to run away without the would-be victim needing to fire a shot. Therefore neither the would-be victim nor the criminal is harmed, and the innocent party gets to keep their valuables. Could there be any better outcome?My explanations of illegal but morally justifiable defensive gun uses was just explaining some of the justifications for Kleck's study. Also, you don't have to read the entire source, but if you don't you simply have to take my word that I'm being honest. Nonetheless I provided them so that you may read them if you wished to. "I assume since I have to advocate a complete gun ban you have to advocate a case where it is easy to get guns not neccessarily where there are no rules whatsoever, but where it is easy to obtain a gun at least easier than it is now. So maybe that 30,000 would be even higher."To be truly honest, there couldn't be many laws that could make it easier for people to get guns. Given the number of guns currently in circulation, anyone who really wants to get a gun can get one. So that 30,000 probably wouldn't increase, or at least very much. http://www.pbs.org...