The US should adopt a ban on all semiautomatic firearms

Appreciated, Con. I’ll now address the opposing case.R1) Compliance with buyback programCon’s first point is that it may disobey the law due to the powerful influence of gun culture. Ironically, his following argument assumes that gun owners are law-abiding and would comply with new gun laws. That contradiction aside, this argument still has multiple problems:a. Most Americans are in favor of stricter gun laws, and Con proves this with his own source. A CNN poll in it from last month finds that most respondents, when asked “do you favor or oppose stricter gun control laws?”, answered favorably at 70% [1]. Gallup, CBS News, and USA Today polls asked the same question and yielded similar results [1]. Con cherry-picked the 87% figure from a query asking about support for a ban on all guns, which isn’t relevant to the resolution of this debate.b. Gun buybacks have worked in other countries with no reports of gun owners rising up in defiance, such as in Australia in ‘96 and Brazil in ‘03. I challenge Con to find a single buyback that resulted in noticeable disobedience, or anything that suggests US gun owners would not be civil in the event of a program happening.R2) Illegal gunsThe assertion made here is that presence of illegal guns on the unregulated market would remain unrestrained, despite my proposal. This isn’t true, however, because the banning the sale/manufacturing/importation of semi-automatic firearms would shut off the flow of new guns being added into circulation. 11 million guns were manufactured in 2013 [8], so assuming that number is the same every year, and most of those guns are semi-automatic, a ban on manufacturing would significantly reduce the amount entering circulation. Because a ban would dampen the available supply of firearms and ammunitions, it would force prices to rise and would make transactions more difficult to complete. Many criminals would, then, decide to forego the process altogether.What’s also worth noting is the risk factor lawbreakers would have to consider. It’s often assumed that criminals don’t and will never adhere to any laws, but to an extent, they do. Criminals internalize a cost to their actions, which thus influences their decision to proceed with committing a crime. Some Yale law researchers found that “...while criminals as a group have negative opinions of the law and legal authority, gun offenders (just like noncriminals) are more likely to comply with the law when they believe (a) in the legitimacy of legal actors, but especially the police, and (b) that the substance of the law is consistent with their own moral schedules” [2]. This means that, while some hardline criminals may ignore new laws, many will become aware the risk possessing a semi-automatic weapon poses, and thus will be more hesitant to purchase them illegally and subsequently use them in crime.Consider also the incredibly passive approach the US takes toward gun trafficking. It’s not even considered a crime, and penalties for “straw purchases”, the buying a gun for someone who legally can’t, are about as severe as getting a speeding ticket [3]. If the US took simple measures to inhibit gun trafficking, we would likely see the availability of illegal guns be reduced.Taking into consideration the natural drain of illegal firearms, the hesitation of criminals, and the mandatory buyback program, we would absolutely see the availability of all guns on the unregulated market plummet.R3) Defensive useCon cites a 23-year-old telephone survey to push an ad nauseum assertion that defensive gun uses number roughly 2.5 million a year. But according the Gun Violence Archive, there were only 2,047 defensive reported and verified gun uses in 2017 [4]. 64% of Kleck’s survey respondents indicated that their defensive gun uses were reported to the police [5], so either less than 0.01% of such incidents are really reported, or Con’s 2 million figure is complete bogus.Using Kleck’s data, guns were used protectively in 845,000 burglaries in 1992 [6]. But out of the 1.3 million burglaries that occurred when someone was home, in only a third of the people home were awake, and only 42% of Americans that year owned guns [6]. Using the numbers, that’s about 117,000 burglaries in which self-defensive could have actually occurred.The Bureau of Justice Statistics, a far more reliable source than Con’s, puts the defensive gun use number at 67,740 a year [7]. In 2012, only 259 justified homicides occurred [7]. Those are far lower numbers than what Con was proporting.R4) HomicidesCon cites a graph on the overall homicide rate of Britain, but that isn’t what should be measured when trying to quantify results: firearm homicides should be. After its peak in 2004, firearm offenses dropped from 24,094 to 7,866 in 2015 [11]. That’s a drop of 67%. The guns that do tend to be used are considered “junk guns”: underpowered, inaccurate, and likely to misfire [12]. This is an indication that Britain is not only getting guns off its streets, but good ones. The Australia graph is, again, on the overall homicide rate. Even if we were to trust that alone, it wouldn’t be statistically significant because the country already had a very low homicide rate that was already declining due to other factors. A measurable effect would have to be observed within the hundreds (since they only have a few hundred murders per year), and that’s not big enough of a number to make a significant conclusion. I did provide numbers in my opening case that showed the amount of firearm homicides taking a dive, so if evidence had to be extracted from the Australia example, that’s about as meaningful a find could be.R5) Illegal gun marketI partially addressed this point above, though I must dispute Con’s assertion that the doors to illegal gun trading would open. The unregulated gun market is thriving aplenty already, and Con hasn’t shown how outlawing semi-automatics would boost it in any way that would encourage illegality and/or crime. Firearm trafficking tends to originate from states with looser laws and higher gun ownership rates [9], which suggests that legality and availability affects the market of illegal weapons. I’ve already demonstrated ways in which my proposal would discourage gun trafficking, such as squeezing the general supply through the cessation of manufacturing/selling, buyback purchasing, hiking the prices, inhibiting criminality via cost-risk, and the possibility of imposing harsher penalties on such behavior (which the US has a lot of room to do).Con invokes Prohibition, but isn’t clear about how it’s relevant. Prohibition was a success insofar that it reduced alcohol consumption [10]; its intended goal was improving health, whereas the goal of gun regulations are to reduce crime and accidents. Alcohol may harm the individual, but it can’t be directly used to commit crime in the way firearms can. I allege that, because consuming alcohol involves individual choice whereas being a victim of gun violence does not, the latter is less desirable and thus more deserving of legal attention.BurdensMost of Con’s arguments have been defensive, along the lines of “it won’t have much of an impact.” Except for his last point, he hasn’t offered anything that suggests that a ban on semi-automatic weapons would be a net detriment. That means that even if you discarded all of my arguments, Con’s burden would hardly be met. Sources1. Con’s first source.2. http://bit.ly...3. http://bit.ly...4. http://bit.ly...5. Con’s third source, p. 186.6. http://bit.ly... (pp. 1441-42)7. http://lat.ms...8. http://n.pr...9. http://nyti.ms...10. http://bit.ly...11. http://bit.ly...12. http://bit.ly...