THW: ban gun ownership by civilians

I can be somewhat mechanical in my responses to say the least. I simply listed the definitions, because it was a spec in your formatting. The structure for my argument will be as such: [1] Gun Laws do Not Deter Crime [2] Guns Deter Crime [3] Violates Second Amendment and Betrays Law Abiding Citizens. I will now begin with the main structure of my argument. [1] Gun Laws do Not Deter Crime While some studies have shown that there is a correlation between firearm related deaths and areas that have higher rates of concealed carry and ownership, none have them have ever been able to show a direct link. I granted myself the luxury of taking a look at source [1] that Pro uses for her opening statement, saying quote, 'areas with a higher prevalence of guns had higher prevalence of gun homicides and homicides in general'. She failed to add the following notion, ' But studies haven"t been able to show a causal relationship " that the mere presence of guns, as opposed to other factors, caused the higher rates of gun violence.' The essential point to take away from this is that social factors are invariably the biggest determination when it comes down to gun violence. A Harvard study in 2007 points out that the main reason that the level of gun ownership in a society does not spur a respective crime rate is that murders are not evenly spread out among the population. Typically this falls to criminals who have an extensive affiliation with crime. To this extent, even if all law abiding citizens were armed, crime would not significantly rise. Additionally, if one takes the adverse effect into account, removing firearms from public ownership will also have no negative effect on crime rates, given most criminals obtain their firearms from illegal sources. According to the BJS of criminals who owned a gun at the time they were arrested, 40% obtained guns from a non registered source. However, this stat does not account for criminals who actively used the firearm, which is a much smaller group than the aforementioned. Any simple analysis will conclude that removing guns from public ownership has a minimal impact on gun crime rates, and multiple studies have shown that if one removes a firearm from the possession of a person intent on causing harm, they simply turn to other means. Case in point is the former USSR, which has the most intensive gun laws of any nation at the time, but also had the highest homicide rates among all developed nations. In a more relevant context, 90% of all violent crime in the US is not related to the use of a gun. To complete this segment, social factors are the prime determinant for firearm crime, not the firearm itself. [2] Guns do Deter Crime According to another BJS study, 60% of criminals admitted to avoiding attempted homicide or assault when they knew the victim was armed, and 40% admitted to cancellation of a hostile act when they even surmised that the intended victim might be armed. 74% of incarcerated individuals confirmed that they feared entering a home while the owner was present under the pretense of being shot, and 57% of felons reported that they are more concerned about meeting an armed individual than they are law enforcement. Another primary example is Kennesaw, GA, which passed a law mandating heads of households to own a firearm in 1982, and consequently burglary and assault rates dropped 89% in the following year. Another study showed that firearms are used around 2.5 million times a year in an action of self defense, nearly 80 times the number of instances guns are used in a violent and fatal act by criminals. Even more interesting, citizens shoot and terminate more than twice the amount of attackers [1527 : 606] than law enforcement, and the error rate is only 2% among these occasions, whereas the police have an error rate of 11%. [3] Violates Second Amendment and Betrays Law Abiding Citizens. Banning ownership of firearms from law abiding citizens who are statistically unlikely to use them in illegal actions does nothing to alleviate crime, and also deducts from lawful practices such as hunting. In the process, you also destroy or negatively impact many establishments and settlements who use hunting and other sport as their primary source of income. During the year of 2011, there were 13.7 million licenced hunters age 16 and older who spent in total 7.7 billion on assault arms and rifles, used for sport. By banning ownership of these weapons, you deduct from a large economic source of revenue, and in turn tax dollars that go to federal and state funding. I have shown: [1] Gun laws have little to no effect on violent crime. [2] Guns in fact do deter crime. [3] Banning guns has a negative impact on not only the economy, but also individual practices.