In the United States, private ownership of handguns ought to be banned.

I negate the resolved: in the United States, private ownership of handguns ought to be banned. Before I begin, a note on burdens: since the affirmation has a changed status quo in their advocacy, they have the majority of the BoP (although the BoP is shared). They need to prove a significant reason to affirm, and the decision for today's round (if voting in affirmation) has to show a significant area in which they won. My value is that of justice, defined simply as giving each their due; consequently, arbitrary actions are always unjust in relation to the subject because arbitrary action cannot be giving one something that they are due. This is true because arbitrary is defined as “based on random choice rather than any reason or system”. Thus, my standard for today’s round is minimising arbitrary action. This is the best standard because it links back directly to justice, as it gives each their due without clouding the relationship to justice. Moreover, minimizing arbitrary action is a preferable standard because it is weighable; the results of arbitrary action, or lack thereof, are noticeable impacts that can be evaluated in-round. Therefore I have my sole contention: the affirmative is arbitrary in nature, devoid of some deeper ‘truth’ - any evidence that they claim to hold as important can be interpreted as the exact opposite of what they claim. They meander through the void, saying that they see light when all they do is remember or simulate its existence. They feign truth in an attempt to disguise their knowledge that we can’t ever grasp truth. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation: Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists, or extreme-right provocation, or a centrist mise-en-scène to discredit all extreme terrorists and to shore up its own failing power, or again, is it a police-inspired scenario and a form of blackmail to public security? All of this is simultaneously true, and the ... objectivity of the facts does not put an end to this vertigo of interpretation. That is, we are in a logic of simulation, which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all the models based on the merest fact - the models come first, their circulation, orbital like that of the bomb, constitutes the genuine magnetic field of the event. The facts no longer have a specific trajectory, they are born at the intersection of models, a single fact can be engendered by all the models at once. This anticipation, this precession, this short circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model (no more divergence of meaning, no more dialectical polarity, no more negative electricity, implosion of antagonistic poles), is what allows each time for all possible interpretations, even the most contradictory - all true, in the sense that their truth is to be exchanged, in the image of the models from which they derive, in a generalized cycle. Further, Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation: To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary." Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces "true" symptoms? Objectively one cannot treat him as being either ill or not ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this point, forestalled by the illness's henceforth undiscoverable truth. For if any symptom can be "produced," and can no longer be taken as a fact of nature, then every illness can be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat "real" illnesses according to their objective causes. Zerubavel 1994 But how could there not be arbitrariness? Nature presents [things] … without firmly established divisions. Everything shades off into everything else by imperceptible nuances. And if, on this ocean of objects surrounding us, there should appear a few that seem to break through the surface and to dominate the rest like the crest of a reef, they merely owe this advantage to … conventions … that have nothing to do with the physical arrangement of beings. I have thus far drawn a deliberately one-sided picture of reality as an array of insular entities neatly separated from one another by great divides. Such discontinuity, however, is not as inevitable as we normally take it to be. It is a pronouncedly mental scalpel that helps us carve discrete mental slices out of reality: “You get the illusion that [entities] are just there and are being named as they exist. But they can be … organized quite differently depending on how the knife moves … It is important to see this knife for what it is and not to be fooled into thinking that [entities] are the way they are just because the knife happened to cut it up that way. It is important to concentrate on the knife itself. The scalpel, of course, is a social scalpel. It is society that underlies the way we generate meaningful mental entities. Reality is not made up of insular chunks unambiguously separated from one another by sharp divides, but, rather, of vague, blurred-edge essences that often “spill over” into one another. It normally presents itself not in black and white, but, rather, in subtle shades of gray, with mental twilighty zones as well as intermediate essences connecting entities. Segmenting it into discrete islands of meaning usually rests on some social convention, and most boundaries are, therefore, mere social artifacts. As such, they often vary from one society to another as well as across historical periods within each society. Moreover, the precise location-not to mention the very existence-of such mental partitions is often disputed within any given society. There is more than one way to carve discrete chunks out of a given continuum, and different cultures indeed mold out of the same reality quite different archipelagos of meaning. While all cultures, for example, distinguish the edible from the inedible or the young from the old, they usually differ from one another in where they draw the lines between them. Let’s look at the story so far:There exist no ways to justify what we think to be true. The simulation is at play when we look at the discourse happening in this debate - we are not there and cannot be there when something happens, so we rely on sources, who blur the lines between the true and the false.The delineation that we find between the true and the false are inherently wrong for two reasons: There exist no lines to pick from that are naturally occurring It is just our social lens that dictates what we think to be true - there is no inherent meaning. Therefore, we are only advocating for arbitrary action within the affirmative world ... arbitrary action is inherently bad because it dissociates itself from my value of justice, something that I think my opponent will agree with me in saying is something necessary for societal wellfare and for a just system to be in place.Thanks.