In the United States, private ownership of handguns ought to be banned

I shall begin with the top of case. The resolution says "Resolved: In the United States, private ownership of handguns ought to be banned." This clearly should be a question of policy, because in forms of competitive debate such as NPDA where resolutions are sometimes but not always about policy, the presence of words such as "should" or "ought" that imply actions are typically interpreted to mean that the resolution should be about policy. In order to prove the resolution, my burden as the Affirmative is to prove that it is better to ban handguns than not to ban handguns. Since the Negative conceded all of my arguments about the benefits of gun control, we should assume that for the purposes of this round, there is a 100% probability that banning handguns in the United States would save 20,182 lives per year, and I have met their burden. On the issue of values, I shall contend that my value of preserving life is greater than NEG"s value of minimizing arbitrary action. If you are dead, it does not matter whether you avoid arbitrary action or you get the value of justice, because you are not able to experience anything. NEG has not given any reason to prefer their value over mine, so I will provide reasons to prefer preservation of life over avoidance of arbitrary action. 1.Preservation of life is a necessary condition for existence (and in fact for having this debate.) If our ancestors did not eat, avoid predators, and take other actions to preserve their own lives we would never have been born. The value of minimizing arbitrary action is in fact dependent on preservation of life because we cannot minimize arbitrary action unless we are alive. 2.Preservation of life is a more weighable standard than avoidance of arbitrary action. We can quantify the number of lives we saved (as I did in my 1AC), but it is impossible to quantify the amount of arbitrary action we prevent, seeing as arbitrary action is qualitative rather than quantitative. 3.The Negative has not provided any clear impacts to illustrate why arbitrary action is bad. They say that it is bad for justice, which is defined as giving each their due. This is a vague definition, since does not explain what someone"s "due" is, and does not show how any concrete harm happens because of people not getting their due. Yet I demonstrate how very real harm happens when private individuals are allowed to own handguns. Death is a real harm that ought to be avoided " not having one"s due is rather meaningless in comparison. People who are dead don"t get their due anyway. If you accept my definition of the criteria for this round, you will be automatically voting for me because they conceded my entire case and provided no offense that is acceptable under the criteria that I have specified above. If not, I will address their case and prove why I am winning on their criteria as well as my own. I am not arbitrary " I have provided clear evidence for why banning handguns in the USA would be a good thing, and they have not answered any of these arguments. It is a standard principle of debate that when an argument is dropped, it is assumed to be true, and they dropped all of my arguments, so the case has moved from being potentially true to being empirically certain, for the purposes of this debate round. There is an extensive amount of argumentation in favor of gun ownership easily accessible to the NEG that they could have used to prove that my argument is arbitrary, but they chose not to use it and because my whole case was dropped it is too late to bring it up now. They claim that being arbitrary is unjust, but you know what is unjust? People being shot to death when their lives could have been prevented had we not made an arbitrary decision to avoid making any decision that might be arbitrary. The NEG tries to deny the existence of truth, but they contradict themselves by saying this because the statement that truth does not exist is itself a truth claim. This statement cannot be true, because if it is true then truth does not exist so it is therefore not true. If a statement is not true, it must be false. If this statement is false, then there is truth and I still have grounds to debate gun control. Cross-apply this argument to NEG"s entire case " they claim certain statements to be true, but they also say that truth does not exist, so if you look at the case from their point of view all of their arguments must be false because they deny truth. This is a reason to disregard the entire 1NC. Since they say that nothing is true they give you no reason to vote for them, since at best their arguments are simultaneously true and untrue, and at worst they are all simply false. Also, NEG misinterprets Baudrillard by claiming that his philosophy describes a world that has no truth or reality where human life does not matter. Instead he describes "hyperreality", which is somewhere in between the real and the imaginary. His emphasis on an external world where the meaning of everything has become lost in endless signs and simulations implies that we should not seek meaning from the external world. If external signs such as wealth and capital create a world devoid of meaning, we should seek to preserve our own existence because in a world where everything outside of us could be unreal, our own existence is the only thing that we can be certain of. Not being shot is a good first step to preserving one"s own existence, so even if you accept Baudrillard as true there is still reason to vote for us. On Zerubavel: I do not deny that arbitrariness exists. This leaves us with two possibilities: Either everything is arbitrary, or some things are not arbitrary. If everything is arbitrary, then we cannot solve for arbitrariness, and it will continue to be just as much of a problem regardless of who you vote for in this debate. However, the existence of universal arbitrariness would create a world in which it is impossible to judge a debate, so it is not a valid criterion for this round. If only some things are arbitrary, we have proven through our statistics and our historical precedent of Australia that we are not arbitrary. This means that our case does not link to any of the arguments about how arbitrariness is bad, and they have no offense against us. Zerubavel"s statements about blurred edges are true for most things, but not human life. Either you are alive or you are dead. There is no in-between. Because we are saving lives by abolishing private ownership of handguns, his arguments about how lines are blurred do not apply. To address NEG"s conclusion: They say that I am arbitrary because I try to find meaning in facts that I draw from sources that I think are objective " but it is actually to avoid arbitrariness that I cited my sources in the 1AC. I at least reduce arbitrariness by doing this, so the claim that citing sources causes arbitrariness is simply not true. I acknowledge that sources are not perfect, but they are better than nothing. By citing evidence we are making the best of what limited knowledge we have available to us in this world. They say that my sources could mean the exact opposite of what I think they mean, but they do not explain how that could happen. They do not give any hypothetical scenario where banning handguns leads to 20,000 more deaths, which is what they would have had to do to prove this argument. They say we should not pick between the true and false. If you reject that argument you will be voting for the Affirmative because you will then be rejecting the entire 1NC. If you accept that argument you will still be voting for the Affirmative because voting for the Negative would be a claim that they are true and I am false, which contradicts their whole advocacy. Even the claim that arbitrariness is bad is itself no more true or untrue in the world of the Negative. They have given you no reasons to vote for them, while I have proven that the policy I am advocating would save 20,000 lives. They claim to reject logic, yet they use logic to support their arguments. They reject truth, yet make claims as to what is true or not true. I fully uphold my burden and due to the arguments they dropped I have already proven the resolution to be true. They lose on their own value, as justice is in itself a truth value and they cannot advocate for justice by denying truth. For these reasons you will be voting for the Affirmative.