On balance, a ban on civilian firearm ownership would be beneficial to the United States

Note that the *only* thing Con has done in response to the studies I cited is contradict the findings in them with his own research. Now, allow me to points out a few outstanding problems with Con's approach, here...Burden of ProofFirst and foremost, Con's method of argumentation simply doesn't negate the resolution. I have completely fulfilled my burden of proof by providing viable studies which thoroughly affirm the resolution; thus, the onus is now upon Con to fully dismantle my arguments, and simply citing sources which contradict mine, as he has done, does not accomplish this. He has to at least provide some sort of reason to prefer his sources. Otherwise, we could just go back and forth throughout the rest of the rounds throwing more sources at each other, and the debate would never progress anywhere. As it now stands, we should prefer my sources by default. Source Reliability I have cited studies from reputable research institutions such as the Harvard School of Public Health and the Violence Policy Center, which would obviously have the resources to engage in accurate, extensive studies of the relationship between gun ownership and crime rates. Meanwhile, Con's data is basically a compilation of numbers that he has gathered from various places around the internet. Of course, since he is relying solely on numbers without taking into account other factors which affect crime rates (which formal research institutions *can* take into account), his logic is a blatant example of correlation/causation fallacy. In other words, Con has not provided any reason for us to believe that the supposed correlation he has found between low rates of gun ownership and high crime rates actually implies a direct causation between the two variables. There are a large variety of factors that must be taken into consideration when attempting to observe such social trends, and merely browsing over general statistics such as a state's annual homicide rate more or less ignores all of that. This idea is well-articulated in the following article excerpt: "[A] study [on gun violence], by Professor Michael Siegel at Boston University and two coauthors, has been peer-reviewed and is forthcoming in the American Journal of Public Health. Siegel and his colleagues compiled data on firearm homicides from all 50 states from 1981-2010, the longest stretch of time ever studied in this fashion, and set about seeing whether they could find any relationship between changes in gun ownership and murder using guns over time."Since we know that violent crime rates overall declined during that period of time, the authors used something called 'fixed effect regression' to account for any national trend other than changes in gun ownership. They also employed the largest-ever number of statistical controls for other variables in this kind of gun study: 'age, gender, race/ethnicity, urbanization, poverty, unemployment, income, education, income inequality, divorce rate, alcohol use, violent crime rate, nonviolent crime rate, hate crime rate, number of hunting licenses, age-adjusted nonfirearm homicide rate, incarceration rate,and suicide rate' were all accounted for."No good data on national rates of gun ownership exist (partly because of the NRA's stranglehold on Congress), so the authors used the percentage of suicides that involve a firearm (FS/S) as a proxy. The theory, backed up by a wealth of data, is that the more guns there are any in any one place, the higher the percentage of people who commit suicide with guns as opposed to other mechanisms will be."With all this preliminary work in hand, the authors ran a series of regressions to see what effect the overall national decline in firearm ownership from 1981 to 2010 had on gun homicides. The result was staggering: 'for each 1 percentage point increase in proportion of household gun ownership,' Siegel et al. found, 'firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9R43; percent. A one standard deviation change in firearm ownership shifted gun murders by a staggering 12.9 percent.'" [1].For this reason, Con's data is inadequate. This becomes especially evident when we see that he attempts to establish his correlations by referring to the high crime rates of areas such as Washington DC and Jamaica, which are particularly notorious for having high poverty [2] and ineffective policing [3], both of which are factors that are much more likely to cause high crime rates than a lack of guns [2] [4]. Meanwhile, in the studies that I cited last round, efforts at taking other relevant variables into account *are* mentioned (especially source 2 & 3), thus furthering my point about how the findings of reputable research institutions, due to their access to financial resources and such, are much more likely to be accurate.General ObjectionAside from statistics, the general idea that higher gun ownership would lead to lower crime rates is wholly implausible. Firstly, I provided a sound rationale last round for why guns naturally lead to more homicides-- their mere presence in hostile situations facilitates domestic violence (which is the most common setting of homicide [5] ) because of how they are specifically designed with features to make killing easy. More importantly, firearms do not serve as an effective form of self- defense, so it makes very little sense that higher gun ownership would deter crime:According to research conducted by the Violence Policy Center, there are a number of practical issues that make it nearly impossible for a civilian to ever effectively use a gun for self-defense. The vast majority of civilians are not well-trained enough to safely handle a gun even in ideal conditions (i.e. an enclosed shooting range); in an actually-dangerous situation, there are also "extreme physiological and psychological effects that the experts, many of whom have on-the-street law enforcement experience with firearms, agree inevitably occur in an armed life-or-death confrontation (the only situation in which lethal force is justified in self-defense)," [6]. To suggest that the average civilian could actually successfully utilize a firearm for self-defense where it actually counts is patently absurd. There is no way that whatever minimal 'benefits' that could come from the self-defense aspect of civilian firearm ownership actually outweigh the increased homicide rates caused by it. And it shows-- "in 1998, for every time that a civilian used a handgun to kill in self-defense, 51 people lost their lives in handgun homicides alone." [6].As for Con's "Premise II", I would like to think that he is trolling. Obviously when I say "high gun ownership leads to more homicides", I am not implying that the guns themselves are killing people-- I am implying that guns facilitate homicides, as was explained earlier.=============CONCLUSION=============1. Con's approach of fighting sources with sources does not work due to the debate's BOP structure; he has the burden to make us prefer his sources to mine, so without doing so, his entire argument amounts to nothing2. The superficial, numbers-based nature of Con's stats renders them inferior to the studies I have provided due to the sheer number of external factors which have a significant effect on crime rates, yet are not represented in the data that Con focuses on.3. The very idea of "more guns = less crime" itself is nonsensical. Guns are proven to facilitate domestic murders, and have very limited use for self-defense, so it is entirely unfeasible that guns could possibly deter crime.The resolution remains affirmed! [1] http://thinkprogress.org...[2] http://www.dccrimepolicy.org...[3] http://jamaica-gleaner.com...[4] http://www.poverties.org...[5] http://www.motherjones.com...[6] http://www.vpc.org...