Firearms licences should not be granted to members of the public

Thank you for proposing this debate. I do not accept my opponents definition of "legitimate purpose". Self defence is a legitimate purpose of firearm ownership. He clearly contradicts himself by saying that there are no legitimate reasons for gun ownership, and then listing other legitimate purposes for owning a firearm. Just because one believes that the results of public firearm ownership are net negative do not make the legitimate purposes of firearms non legitimate. My opponent also greatly oversimplifies the nature of competitive target shooting. In the upper echelons of target shooting, guns are tuned specifically for each individual owner and carry a high price tag, making renting an unfeasible option for highly competitive or Olympic leagues. My opponent has selectively picked data regarding various nations in order to justify his assertion that gun ownership harmful to society. He cites Japan as a seemingly obvious example of gun control being a successful policy. However, this is simply not an accurate analogy. Japan's crime rate is overall lower than virtually any country, including crimes completely irrelevant to guns ownership. For example, my opponent makes the claim that United States gun deaths are 171 times more in number than in Japan. However, The robbery rate in America is almost 100 times greater than Japan. This being the case, one could hardly come to the conclusion that firearm control is the sole contributing factor, or even the primary contributing factor in Japanese crime. It would be just as accurate (actually, much, much more accurate) for me to claim that acceptance and toleration of police brutality and an unfair trial system is the primary cause of lower crime in Japan. It is important to note that correlation does not imply causation. http://www.breakingnews.ie... http://www.davekopel.com... Comparing Britain to the United States as a whole is simply nonsensical. The United States works based on the Federalist system, in which each state sets its own rules. States such as New Hampshire have almost unrestricted gun ownership and much lower homicide rates than Britain. Meanwhile, Washington DC is simultaneously the most anti gun region in the country and the murder capital. However, unlike my opponent, I refuse conclude that this disparity is caused by gun control or gun ownership. Rather, this simply shows that gun control is not inherently effective at reducing crime or homicide. This is unsurprising, as crime and homicide has risen sharply since the 1997 handgun ban in Britain. The best way to deal with crime in any circumstance is to tackle the root cause. I believe that even my opponent would agree that drug trafficking is the root cause of violence in Mexico, not legal gun ownership. http://www.telegraph.co.uk... My opponent seems deadset in his opinion that gun ownership results in crime and violence. I will end my round by revealing an extensive and exhaustive study on this topic, in which socio-economic and cultural factors are taken into account. The results of this study convincingly show that gun ownership is not within itself a societal risk factor. http://ssrn.com...