Guns Should Be Banned From Civilians

Thanks to Con for his argument.I will be presenting my constructive case and as many rebuttals as I can fit in this round.== AFF CASE ==My case centers around one contention-- that rates of homicide would decrease with the implementation of a gun ban. This is prima facie obvious-- if we take away weapons which make committing murders easier, then murder rates will inevitably decrease. The presence of firearms does facilitate violent crime, and numerous studies conclusively prove so; there is a growing body of evidence indicating a clear upwards correlation between gun availability and homicide rates. From researchers at Harvard: "Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and homicide across states.. We found that states [in the United States] with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide," [1]. "[A] study [on gun violence], by Professor Michael Siegel at Boston University and two coauthors, has been peer-reviewed and is forthcoming in the American Journal of Public Health. Siegel and his colleagues compiled data on firearm homicides from all 50 states from 1981-2010, the longest stretch of time ever studied in this fashion, and set about seeing whether they could find any relationship between changes in gun ownership and murder using guns over time... Since we know that violent crime rates overall declined during that period of time, the authors used something called 'fixed effect regression' to account for any national trend other than changes in gun ownership. They also employed the largest-ever number of statistical controls for other variables in this kind of gun study: 'age, gender, race/ethnicity, urbanization, poverty, unemployment, income, education, income inequality, divorce rate, alcohol use, violent crime rate, nonviolent crime rate, hate crime rate, number of hunting licenses, age-adjusted nonfirearm homicide rate, incarceration rate,and suicide rate' were all accounted for... With all this preliminary work in hand, the authors ran a series of regressions to see what effect the overall national decline in firearm ownership from 1981 to 2010 had on gun homicides. The result was staggering: 'for each 1 percentage point increase in proportion of household gun ownership,' Siegel et al. found, 'firearm homicide rate increased by 0.943; percent. A one standard deviation change in firearm ownership shifted gun murders by a staggering 12.9 percent.'" [2].Both of these studies go to show that, when we take into account the various causes of violent crime, we can see that the presence of guns itself is, indeed, a direct contributing cause of high homicide rates. A gun is specifically designed with features to cause fatal injuries; according to Professor Zimring from UC Berkeley, those features *do* serve to facilitate homicides: "Gun assaults are seven times as likely to kill as all other kinds of criminal assault, and about five times as likely to kill as are knives, the next most deadly weapon that is frequently used in criminal attacks. Firearms robbery is about four times as likely to produce a victim death as a non-firearms robbery," [3]. The mere presence of a gun in a tense situation allows for what normally would have been a heated argument or fist fight to result in murder: "Access to firearms yields a more than five-fold increase in risk of intimate partner homicide when considering other factors of abuse, according to a recent study, suggesting that abusers who possess guns tend to inflict the most severe abuse on their partners." [4].In conclusion, the prevalence of guns has a proven link to higher rates of homicide; since a reduction of homicide rates would obviously be of substantial net benefit to society, and since governments have an obligation to pursue the general welfare of their people, it is only reasonable that guns be banned from civilians. == NEG CASE ==R1) Second AmendmentAs I noted in my acceptance round, the resolution is not US-specific, and thus arguments from the constitutionality should be rejected. Anyhow, the US Constitution, like the constitutions of all legitimate democratic societies, is meant to be a living document, which "evolves, changes over time, and adapts to new circumstances, without being formally amended." [5]. Simply citing the status quo and saying guns are have always have been allowed does not serve as a reason for why they shouldn't be banned in modern society. I have demonstrated that gun bans result in substantial benefits, thus warranting their implementation.R2) CriminalsCon claims that criminals can still illegally obtain guns to continue killing; I assume this observation is meant to somehow mitigate the reduction in homicides that would come from a gun ban. However, this observation really holds very little weight at all, as 79% of all murders are domestic in nature, being inflicted by friends and family [6]. In other words, the vast majority of homicides are committed by fellow civilians who would most likely not have the motivation to illegally obtain a gun for the purposes of their crimes. Thus, the observation that criminals in particular would still continue to illegally use guns does not even come close to mitigating the enormous benefit that would come from restricting guns from civilians as a whole. Anyways, his observation is false. A ban on civilian gun ownership would also reduce criminal gun ownership. It is simply due to a matter of economics. The vast majority of guns owned by criminals originate from legal producers [7], so if a gun ban were to cause those legal producers to cease in their production of firearms, it would suddenly make it much more difficult for criminals to obtain guns. They would be forced to resort to illegal producers of guns, which would inevitably be *much* slower and more expensive because of the variety of economic disadvantages they have compared to legal producers (i.e. they can't operate large factories or have access to mass production technologies, thus being confined mostly to cottage industries). Furthermore, police forces would still possess guns, and would quite easily be able to handle the gun-deprived criminals.R3) Self-DefenseIt is true that the local police force cannot always successfully protect citizens from harm. However, in order for this observation to have any impact on the resolution, we must assume that having guns would enable citizens to successfully protect themselves from harm. There is no reason to accept this assumption, especially in face of evidence to the contrary showing that people are generally incapable of effectively using guns for self-defense. According to studies conducted by the Violence Policy Center, there are a number of practical issues that make it nearly impossible for a civilian to ever effectively use a gun for self-defense. The vast majority of civilians are not well-trained enough to safely handle a gun even in ideal conditions (i.e. an enclosed shooting range); in an actually-dangerous situation, there are "extreme physiological and psychological effects that the experts, many of whom have on-the-street law enforcement experience with firearms, agree inevitably occur in an armed life-or-death confrontation (the only situation in which lethal force is justified in self-defense)," [8]. To suggest that the average civilian could actually successfully utilize a firearm for self-defense where it actually counts is absurd. There is no way that whatever minimal 'benefits' that could come from the self-defense aspect of civilian firearm ownership actually outweigh the increased homicide rates caused by it. And it shows-- "in 1998, for every time that a civilian used a handgun to kill in self-defense, 51 people lost their lives in handgun homicides alone." [8]. Additionally, there are plenty of other viable means of self-defense, including a pocket knife or mace.R4) Homicide RatesCon claims that gun bans do not have any impact on homicide rates, but he backs this up with only a *single* piece of evidence: the fact that UK's homicide rates increased from 1996 to 2002 despite the gun control laws in 1996. However, this usage of statistics is blatantly unfair. It is well-known that there was a global increase in crime rates from 1980 to 2000 due to a variety of socioeconomic factors, so his statistic is really just an observation of a long-term trend and doesn't actually prove anything [9]. Moreover, it is clearly an example of correlation/causation fallacy; studying the relationship between two variables (gun ownership & homicide rates) simply doesn't hold any weight when it comes to an issue as complicated as what causes crime. There are *many* variables which Con is completely ignoring with his analysis, including income inequality [10], prison incarceration rates [11], drug use [12], and the efficacy of local police forces [13]. All of these factors play very important roles in the fluctuations of violent crime rates; to ignore all of them and just concentrate on the patterns of one of those factors is blatantly misleading. The evidence provided in my constructive case should be preferred because it takes these other variables into account, whereas Con's evidence does not. A prevalence of gun ownership *does* lead to an increase in homicide rates. That's all I have space for this round.I will address the rest of Con's contentions next round.Back to my opponent!SOURCES: http://www.debate.org...