All Guns Should Not Be Banned

" - should only be considered necessary if one is threatened with deadly force." I completely agree with this, but as I'm sure you understand that can be an incredibly tough call. You can't always call 911 as Sarah McKinley had done in Oklahoma( http://www.cnn.com...). What do you do if your trapped somewhere and a robber is approaching you. The uncertainty of their actions may make your life seem like it's at risk. Proper training, would be the only means of preparing for those types of situations. The only bad part is, there arnt a whole lot of programs that teach you when and how you should use a gun. Some times it's enough to just brandish a handgun, but sometimes you'll need to use it. Making that judgment call is hard. " not having accidental discharge - possibly killing oneself or another innocent person - is too big of a factor to overlook." This again, is why we need to look to training."I often wonder how many of the children that shot themselves or their parents or their siblings could have been stopped if proper gun awareness and safety was taken into better account. I don't deny the fact that bringing a handgun into a house, especially with children, always leaves a potential for accidents. My heart goes out to the families who lost innocent lives due to guns, but I argue that many of these may have been preventable. You made an argument about the usefulness of a gun that was locked away. It seems counterintuitive. Keeping it locked away is the best way to keep your child safe, but what happens if a robber breaks in and you need it, it's basically useless locked up right? To this however, I would argue it would only take a minute to get to it, and if you need more than that, having it out wouldn't have saved you anyways. "How hard would it be to have a gun locked in a bed side container, maybe you tape the key underneath your bed so the kids can't grab it. If an assailant is so close that getting to the gun isn't possible, then even if you had the gun out in the open it would be useless. I encourage you to watch this video ( https://m.youtube.com...) it is a slightly different scenario with police officers being attacked by a knife wielder (just in practice), but it shows a good point. If an assailant is already close enough to start and assault whether or not you have a gun in the open isn't going to make a difference I'd the attacker is serious. My point with this is if guns were kept locked away many of those deaths would have been prevented. I am on the side of keeping handguns away from children, but keeping your child safe from potential threats outside the house is also important. We need to find a situation that is the best of both worlds whenever possible. "The strongest gun policy to prevent criminals from getting guns would be to simply get rid of the guns all together." I agree with this. If you could somehow get rid of all the guns then criminals could not get them, but who's going to be the easiest to get the guns away from? If you put a national gun confiscation order what's going to happen is that everyone owning a gun legally will be forced to give theirs up and those who own illegally will just hide theirs. There's no proof that anyone owns guns besides legal owners. I argue it would be an impossible task. In regards to Australia I would like to note that handguns, such as the 9mm, have not been banned. "In Australia, civilians are not allowed to possess automatic and semi-automatic firearms, self-loading and pump action shotguns, handguns with a calibre in excess of .38in with only narrow exemptions, semi-automatic handguns with a barrel length less than 120mm, and revolvers with a barrel length less than 100mm"(http://www.gunpolicy.org...) Also the data on whether or not the policies have worked are dependent on how your viewing the data. In an article ( http://www.nationalreview.com...) when the data was looked at over a longer timeline there didn't seem to be a large link between banning guns and lessening rates of suicides. They had declined sure, but they declined at the same rate they had been declining previously. In that same article when looking at homicides they show a chart from 1980 to 2004 of the homicide rates. Again, the data seems to show that although they have decreased it is at a similar rate to what they have been already decreasing at. I do not deny that the gun bans may have helped continue the decrease in gun related deaths, but I argue that the evidence just simply isn't strong enough to support that relationship. Next Argument: The United States arguably has looser gun laws than other countries. But how have we been doing as a country? In a study (here: http://www.factcheck.org...) when looking at the statistics across a range of different topics here's what they concluded; "The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world " by far. And it has the highest rate of homicides among advanced countries. And yet, gun crime has been declining in the U.S. Firearm murders are down, as is overall gun violence "" even as gun ownership increases." Does this mean guns are safe? No, of course not. I note the same article shows that increased guns relate to increased gun death. "areas with a higher prevalence of guns had higher prevalence of gun homicides and homicides in general." The only issue with the data however is that it is impossible to tell that it was purely the increase in guns that caused the relationship. "But studies haven"t been able to show a causal relationship " that the mere presence of guns, as opposed to other factors, caused the higher rates of gun violence." The data is mixed again when you look at the combined relationship between gun violence and gun ownership of the world instead of just the US. "The National Research Council of the National Academies concluded in its report that studies comparing large geographic areas, what it called "ecological studies," didn"t show a distinct trend, and instead "provide[d] contradictory evidence on violence and firearms." Yes, there have been many terrible cases of gun related incidents that have lead to deaths of innocent life, but I can bring up hundreds of articles that show when they have saved lives. The point of my argument is that the issues arnt with gun ownership, the issue is with how little people are trained to use them properly.