The United States Ought to Ban Firearms

The firearms is a largely controversial subject, with large impacts. Regardless of which side you are on, the public policy decision on firearms will affect hundreds of thousands of lives. Thus, debate on this issue is paramount. I’m glad I can debate tajshar2k on this, as I know that both of us are very adamant about our views, but also have the logic to back it up. I look forward to the discourse!My framework for this debate is simple. Governments ought to operate upon utilitarian means. The policy that creates more benefit than cost ought to be enacted and the policies that create more cost than benefit ought to be repealed. Banning firearms will result in thousands of saved lives, and outweighs the amount of lives that may be ended as the result of the policy, thus the US ought to ban firearms. My plan for affirming the resolution is thus; the production, sale, transport, use, and possession of firearms for regular US citizens (excluding military, law enforcement, etc.), will be made illegal. Citizens will have a set amount of time to turn in their firearms to a collection center (they would be in the parking lots of grocery stores, that kind of stuff), and if they are found doing one of the things above, they will be punished by whatever punishment is put in place. Searching houses for firearms would work the same as searching a house for illegal drugs would work, the law enforcement would get a warrant from a court if they have adequate reason to believe that the household contains firearms, and then they can search the premises. I’m not going to go extremely specific into the plan because I want the debate to focus more on the concept of banning the possession of firearms than nitpicking a plan. I want to debate the bigger picture. But continuing off from before, the first reason that firearms ought to be banned is to reduce the amount of suicides. This is because firearms are the most common, and the most lethal method of suicide. Suicide by firearm is almost always fatal. When an individual possesses a firearm, they are more likely to attempt suicide than someone who does not possess a firearm. “Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and suicide across states, 1999-2001. States with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm suicide and overall suicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups. It remained true after accounting for poverty, urbanization and unemployment.” [1] This is due to the psychology of suicide. Most suicide attempts are done impulsively, with little planning during a short-term crisis [2]. If highly lethal means such as firearm are made unavailable to the attempter then they will either have to use less lethal means or postpone their attempt. If the former is chosen, given that the other most common methods of suicide have under a 5% mortality rate [3], the attempter is very likely to survive. And given that 90% of all survivors never attempt suicide again, and have their depression successfully treated [4]. And if the latter option is chosen, given the impulsiveness of suicide, the individual is unlikely to attempt suicide again. To see the number of lives saved we can take the amount of firearm suicides: 21,175 [5], and given that the lethality will be reduced by 95% (will have to use a less lethal method, lethality of 5%), 20,116 of those suicides will be unsuccessful. 90% of these attempters will be successfully treated, so then reduce that 20,116 by 90%. That ends up with 18,104 lives saved by banning firearms. And that's not even accounting for the amount of suicides that will be deterred by not having a gun in the home. Given that gun ownership makes someone 3 times more likely to commit suicide [6], taking away guns would further reduce the total amount of suicides by one third. And then this is not even accounting for the people that would be deterred from attempting because of the impulsiveness of suicide. In the end, not only save thousands of lives by preventing suicide, but also prevent the suffering brought to communities and families as the result of the suicide. Banning firearms has the potential to prevent large amounts of suffering. The second area would be in reduced gun accidents. Because of the inherent deadliness of firearms, they cause thousands of accidental deaths per year. "In 2007, the United States suffered some 15,000-19,000 accidental shootings…About 200 Americans go to emergency rooms every day with gunshot wounds…” [7] The four states with the highest gun ownership has seven times higher mortality rates than the four states with the lowest gun ownership [8]. For every one time that a firearm was used for self-defense, there were four accidental shootings [9]. And increased training or education doesn’t reduce the amount of accidental shootings; as gun training has been found to increase the owner’s likelihood of storing firearms loaded and unlocked [10]. Banning firearms, and thus removing the firearm from the home, would completely eliminate all firearm related accidents. Therefore, around 15,000-19,000 lives will be saved every year.The last contention I will bring up in this round is crime. Firearms are a tool that makes a criminal more effective. That is why most criminals use firearms to carry out their crimes; they are effective. Taking away access to firearms, or making it harder to get them would make crime less effective. They would have to carry out crime with less effective weapons such as knives, or bats. Of which are much less fatal to victims. Since the production of firearms would stop, it would lower the supply of firearms to criminals, making it harder to get access to firearms, which would cause *some* criminals to use other weapons. So although not all criminals would be forced to use other weapons, some would. And thus the benefits still follow through. And since we would rather have some criminals use firearms than all criminals using firearms, we ought to ban guns. That’s all I’m going to bring up in my case. Peace and Love[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu...[2] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu...[3] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu...[4] http://www.save.org...[5] http://www.cdc.gov...[6] http://www.thedailybeast.com...[7] http://www.thedailybeast.com...[8] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu...[9] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...[10] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu...