It Should be Legal in the U.S. to Occasionally Hit Someone

Thanks to my opponent for instigating this debate, I accept his definitions. ---- It should be pointed out that in some cases it is of course perfectly legal to hit someone. No one is going to be prosecuted for a genuinely playful slap, parents are allowed to discipline minors, you can use reasonable force to defend yourself from attack and some schools still administer occasional corporal punishment under signed consent. [1] There are probably other examples but I will not take the semantic route of invalidating a resolution that calls for the instigation of laws that already exist. I will instead debate my opponent on his opinions. In any case my opponent's definitions make it clear that he advocates delivering blows against just "some person" from "time to time" which covers just about any instance of provoked or unprovoked hitting. If people were given license to wander around delivering blows to random people who happen to annoy them, the world would be a worse place. I will be proving that in almost all cases a law permitting this kind of hitting is unjust and should not be accepted. ----- 1) Stress relief. Blatantly flawed. Hitting causes more stress than it relieves because being hit is very stressful indeed whereas hitting someone while it may be satisfying does not relieve much. My opponent should provide a source to prove that it can release any stress at all. If you hit someone and then they pull out a knife or a gun, you will find your stress levels increase dramatically. 2) Education. Being hit may teach you not to repeat the exact behaviour that led to being hit but certainly does not teach right from wrong, merely that might is right. Educators agree that self-esteem and confidence are essential to effective learning. Being hit negatively effects these. [2] Hitting someone and not facing the consequences or being compelled to regret it and apologise teaches people that it is OK and even beneficial to behave this way and it certainly isn't. Hitting people will not help you keep friends or hold down a job. 3) Conflict resolution. Fights are less likely to resolve conflicts than exacerbate them, look at the pattern of gang violence where a word out of place can quickly escalate to fists and then even more quickly onto weaponry. People who have been hit may well wish to get some form of revenge. In addition even if it is conceivable that more fights would save on prosecution costs (which I doubt for the reasons above) they can also have a negative economic impact as an injured individual will have to take time off work and will therefore not be contributing to the economy. 4) Exercise. There are far less stressful and more pleasurable forms of exercise even without setting foot in a gym. Sex between consenting adults is a great example. [3] 5) Breeding. By rewarding violence, natural selection will favour the aggressive and the impulsive rather than the enlightened and the thoughtful, not a good end result for species survival. 6) American doctrine. I'm far less informed on this subject than I'm sure my opponent and most readers will be but it is my understanding that an individual's rights are not allowed to infringe on those of another person. A phrase summing this up that I have heard used by many Americans on this site and elsewhere is that "your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins." While I am not suggesting that that is the actual wording of the constitution, I was under the impression that it was a para-phrasing of some of the principles laid out in it. ---- If my opponent really thinks that hitting is acceptable, I can only assume that either he has never taken a good beating himself or he has taken one too many and is suffering from mild brain damage. I'm not a big guy but I'm a grown man and my opponent is a 14 year-old youth, if I lamped him in the head I think he would (rightfully) want me to be punished. ---- That will be all for now. Con. ----- Sources: [1] http://www.corpun.com... [2] http://www.thelearningweb.net... [3] http://www.healthcentral.com...