Guns should be more heavily restricted in the US

Hello, and thank you for the (surprisingly) punctual response. I will be covering my own side of this issue and then cover my opponents arguments. The most safe and successful civilizations were always the ones where the people had the right to own self defense weapons. Here are some examples: Ancient Rome, middle age England, 18th century France, and finally modern Iceland. I will briefly cover the first three because they are less relevant than newer sources; and then I will talk about Iceland. With all of the first three countries owning a weapon was almost mandatory, not because times were more violent, but because people had more common sense. Also these weren't the only countries from their time frame, but just the ones that I chose. In none of these countries will you find a problem or even a need for self defense control. That is because the people were the crime control. For example, in England, if you were to rob someone, you faced everyone within earshot coming to chase you down. Because everyone had some form of self defence. This shows that It isn't the "guns" fault, but the person wielding it. Now for Iceland; the reason I bring up Iceland is because it is a good example of what gun control should look like, namely none. In Iceland there are just over 300,000 people, 90,000 of which own guns[1]. The affirmative would say that with so many access routes to guns for criminals the crime rate would be very high, however according to[2], there were an average of 3 murders per year, or a 1/100,000 intentional homicide rate. This is because criminals know that it is nearly 100% likely that someone in the area of the crime will have a gun. I am only 17 and I am not allowed to carry a gun, but I carry two self defense knives. The feeling of security I get from them and the knowledge of the fact that if I am attacked, I can defend myself, is a huge reassurance. Now I will address my opponent's case. In his first sentence he affirms the idea of equality, however when has equality ever worked? If you were to think about how equality works you would know that it lowers the playing field, the people who have more of whatever is being limited now have less freedom. Everyone is different, to try to equalize anything just doesn't work. For example with the new common core school system everyone has to do the exact same work, despite skill in the area. All this does is limit both the intelligence of the best students, and the possible knowledge learnable by the worst students. In the same way it isn't the government's job to be limiting who or how or what when it comes to guns. My opponent next talked about laws and how they help keep a situation under control. I agree with almost all of his statement except for one thing. Laws should punish once you have committed a crime, not limit your ability to commit a crime. Mainly because there is no way to keep criminals from having guns at the same time as allowing citizens to own them. If we limit the amount of ways a criminal can get guns, like my opponent suggests, you also limit the ways that law abiding people can obtain them. Also when have criminals ever followed the rules anyway? If we make laws to limit guns, the criminals will still break the law to get the guns to break the law again! I hope that I have addressed the issue of guns and why it is better to keep them around, Thank you! [1]http://www.bbc.com... [2]icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2015/05/13/iceland_3rd_lowest_murder_rate/