Gun rights.

“What I find funny is that basically everything you argued was copy paste but just because not all fro same link I guess not plagiarised to be considered forfeit. I only point this out because you raise this in your round 1 conditions.” There is a difference. Firstly, what I stated were quotations: I put them in quotation marks and provided proper representation of the original source of these claims. This is not plagiarism, as I am not presenting the words as if they were my own. “Firstly, we are discussing gun rights in the scenario whereby the law is successfully carried out (the feasibility should not be taken into consideration as you can't judge whether or not gun rights are good or bad based on failed implementation of it).” I completely disagree with this condition. At no point did I even suggest such a thing. I stated that gun rights should remain in secular societies. The very fact that it is impossible to carry out is my entire point, and therefore I refuse to accept this. If you are going to combat my points, you have to do so without playing word-games with me. "There is no point justifying one's right to guns by saying that when they are banned, people illegally use guns to kill. This is the reason people shouldn't be allowed guns in the first place!” Except, this was done in areas were gun control was highest. The fact is, most civilians didn’t have guns, and yet this was still done. The reason for this is because, no matter how much control you have of guns, you will not stop people from smuggling them into country. The fact of the matter is, your point is illogical: gun control was enforced, therefore robberies increased, therefore more gun control should be enforced? That makes no sense. “However, there is no proof that the gun rights actually assisted towards lowering of government corruption, the law being implemented happened to be at the same time as the government felt change was necessary, they didn't suddenly stop corruption DUE TO gun rights. It was two simultaneous events occurring, not one due to the other.” The problem with this line of logic is that we reviewed multiple nations. Not just America. The U.N. found that countries with freer gun laws had less corruption, while countries with stricter gun laws had more corruption. The reason behind this is because a corrupt government needs strict gun laws in order to prevent riots against it. Even if the gun laws did not cause the decrease in corruption, the fact of the matter is this: there is a correlation of some kind. Either the gun laws are lowering corruption, or a lack of corruption is allowing gun rights; either way, gun rights are correlating with a lack of corruption, showing that a country with less gun laws are more likely to be fair to its people. Therefore, gun laws are a good thing for a secular society either way. “The fourth contention doesn't count as my opponent simply repeated the second.” Except, it isn’t the same. Gun laws could have absolutely no effect, while gun rights have extreme effect; however, this is not the case. Gun laws actually increase gun violence. This is a fact based on the statistics provided. Gun rights could have absolutely no effect; however, this is not the case either. Based on the statistics, it is shown that crime actually lowered when the amount of people purchasing firearms increased. Therefore, I concluded that I have negated your points. “In robberies and assaults, victims are far more likely to die when the perpetrator is armed with a gun than when he or she has another weapon or is unarmed.” Well, clearly. No one is arguing that guns aren't used to hurt people. But as I have already pointed out, a gun is 60x more likely to be used in self-defense than to commit a crime. However, what you seem to be ignoring is the fact that people are more likely to be attacked if they do not have a weapon on their person. The 1997 National Crime Victimization Survey states: “Robbery and assault victims who used a gun to resist were less likely to be attacked or to suffer an injury than those who used any other methods of self-protection or those who did not resist at all.” [1] The very reason these victims were dying with armed perpetrators was because they did not have a weapon on their person. Therefore, point negated. “On the other hand, research has shown that a gun kept in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a member of the household, or friend, than an intruder.[2] The use of a firearm to resist a violent assault actually increases the victim's risk of injury and death.[3]” Sure, there is a risk to owning guns. This is irrelevant, however; of course a person with a gun is more likely to kill a member of their household or friend. Any weapon will increase those odds. However, my opponent did not read his source: 34 times out of that 43 were suicides (which were increased, as we saw, when guns were not involved), 4.6 were used in criminal homicide, and only 1.3 were accidents. Not to mention that the study was not properly done, as it only studied cases in the United States. [2] “First, the decision involves a trade-off between the risks of gun accidents and violent victimization. Second, it is not entirely clear that the relatively few robberies and assaults in which victims defended themselves with guns are typical of these types of crimes and that the lower injury rates resulted from the self-defense action rather than some other factor.” Gun accidents made up 1.3% of the statistics in your own source. Guns were more likely to be used in suicide attempts, which made up a majority of your 43x, which actually increased when guns were not in the equation, as pointed out in Round 2. My opponent states, then, that guns protected more against lower injury crimes. This is not the case; while it is true that it is more likely to be used in cases of low injury crimes, it also has statistics of decreasing the odds of death during armed robbery and assaults, which are high injury crimes. The reason it is more commonly used in low injury crimes is because low injury crimes are more likely to occur overall. “Research by Dr. Arthur Kellerman has shown that keeping a gun in the home carries a murder risk 2.7 times greater than not keeping one." My only response to this is this quote “The observed gun-homicide association is so weak that it could easily be due entirely to a higher rate of concealing gun ownership among controls than among cases.” [3] People with concealed weapons are more likely to lie about this; therefore, all it would take for this study to be void is if 3% of cases or 13% of controls lied during their survey. Furthermore, the homicide were committed outside criminals using their own guns, and not by someone with access to the house-gun, which was the entire point of the study. [4] Point negated, I think. My opponent failed to give a source for his information in the last point. However, I will address the point: the fact of the matter is, guns are manufactured. You can’t just turn back time and stop their prduction While the fact that guns were sold may contribute to the problem, what my opponent is essentially saying is that gun production, which has already been performed, must be stopped. However, those guns will still be in circulation; it will simply be in the black market. Similarly, if production were to have ceased, people would make their own guns, as was done during the prohibition in the 1900s in America with alcohol. The way this would be done is by the simple fact that people know how to make them; after all, how else would they be produced to begin with. I conclude that, even if this was the case, it is irrelevant. [1] Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control, 1997 [2] http://stason.org... [3] Kleck, Gary. Targeting Guns. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter; 1997. P. 245. [4] http://guncite.com...