Stricter Gun Control

Thanks, Pro!Gun Crime vs Overall CrimeAlthough I will not dispute the gun crime stats that Pro has presented, he is still missing the big picture. Gun crime is only a part of overall crime. If we want gun control to work, we want to make so that it reduces all crime, not just incidents where firearms are present. I have numerous sources that show that homicide rates virtually always go up with gun control laws, not in conflict with the fact that gun crime does perhaps go down.America has by far the top gun ownership rate in the world, with 90.0 guns per 100 residents. This is much higher than second-place Serbia with 58.2 guns per 100 residents, followed by Yemen with 54.8 guns per 100 residents and so on[1][3]. If America has such an enormous plethora of guns, then it should have the highest murder rate in the world as well, right?Wrong. Honduras, a country with strict gun control laws, has the number one homicide rate per capita in the world, with a rate of 90.4 per 100,000 people[4][5]. Followed by that is Venezuela, also with tight gun regulation. America didn't even make the top ten, or the top twenty or the fifty. In fact, the U.S. didn't even make the top one hundred. It made #111 on the list, with virtually all the other countries above having some kind of gun laws.Murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants in 2012[5] (The darker the blue, the higher the homicide rate) s://upload.wikimedia.org...; alt="" />A Harvard study on gun control found that nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that don't. “For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland's murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe.”[7]Australia vs UKThe UK law of 1968 wasn't even a gun ban at all. It was simply "requiring civilians to obtain a certificate from their district police chief in order to purchase or possess a shotgun. This law also required that firearm certificates specify the identification numbers ("if known") of all firearms and shotguns owned by the applicant."[6]The later law was a true ban, even if Pro may state otherwise. "In 1997, Britain passed a law requiring civilians to surrender almost all privately owned handguns to the police. More than 162,000 handguns and 1.5 million pounds of ammunition were 'compulsorily surrendered' by February 1998. Using "records of firearms held on firearms certificates," police accounted for all but fewer than eight of all legally owned handguns in England, Scotland, and Wales."[6]Guns vs CarsThere is a problem with Pro's reasoning: guns have a very useful function. Aside from hunting, guns protect people from criminals. The evidence I have provided below supports this.Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University, conducted a survey in 1993 that found that "there are approximately two million defensive gun uses (DGUs) per year by law abiding citizens.Â Prior to Dr. Kleck's survey,Â thirteen other surveysÂ indicated a range of between 800,000 to 2.5 million DGU's annually."[2]Firearms can be used to scare criminals instead of actually shooting them, thus why non-firearm crime decreases. The drop of non-gun crime has a pretty big effect on overall crime, as I have shown earlier in this round. Simply touting off gun-related misdemeanors alone does not show the true effectiveness of gun regulation. Countries with higher gun control laws have higher crime rates because criminals are stopped in the act or they are to scared to go into a home they know is likely to have a gun or attack someone who might have conceal and carry permit.Mass ShootingsPopulation is indeed relevant because a higher population means a likelier chance exists that a shooting could occur in a certain area. Australia has a much lower population than the U.S., so less shootings are not that surprising. To add, shootings tend to happen in gun-free zones. John R Lott sums it up nicely: “Killers go where victims can't defend themselves. In the Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting,out of the seven theaters the Batman movie premiere within 20 minutes of the suspect's apartment, only one banned permitted concealed handguns. The suspect didn't go to the closest nor the largest, but to the one that banned self-defense. Time after time the story is the same.”[8]Every mass shooting (with just one exception) since 1950 in the U.S. has occured in places where concealed carry holding is banned[8].A black market handgun in Australia may be $15k, but what is it for other countries? A criminal can always steal a gun from a store or maintain them before the ban gets put in place. Guns are quite accessible despite bans, and in a country with a lot of guns prior to such a law in won't necessarily mean that criminals won't have access to them any longer. They will go to long measures to get one if they really are a criminal at heart.Sources1. http://youtu.be...html2. http://www.guncite.com.... http://en.m.wikipedia.org...3. https://en.wikipedia.org...4. http://www.huffingtonpost.com...5. https://en.wikipedia.org...6. http://www.justfacts.com... 7. http://www.theacru.org...8. http://www.usatoday.com...