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

Hello my name is Michael Bojarsky, and as the Con speaker for this debate, I negate my opponent's proposition, "In the United States, private ownership of handguns ought to be banned" To start with, I would like to point out that my opponent failed to introduce a value, or criterion by which to evaluate both his and my arguments, therefore my criterion is the single standard by which to weigh all three rounds and is invalid to refute. My criterion is based on the central value of morality, due to the fact that the moral agent of the resolution is the United States, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, John Locke explains the central value of morality as the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." My first contention is that handguns are not the problem. According to the national association for mental health, one hundred percent of the shootings before 2016 were committed by people with diagnosed mental illness. This takes all the impact out of your first and only contention and has been refuted. Also you pointed out that the problem with handguns is that they are being obtained illegally, which actually conceits to my point that the problem is with access. With my counterplan, I will and can enforce strict background checks so that anyone with an experience of mental illness in their medical record, doesn't have a perfect crime record, or doesn't have the basic documents needed to purchase a handgun will fail to do so. This has an advanced solvency to the implied problem the resolution logically focuses on and thus is better than the affirmative's plan. My second contention is that enforcing a handgun ban will actually increase the death rates. According to criminologist brief 23, a statistical analysis that regresses murder rates against the presence or absence of strict gun laws in 20 European nations concludes that strict gun laws are actually correlated with more murders, not fewer. So if we were to ban handguns, there would be even more deaths, which is contradictory to the reason for banning handguns in the first place. My fellow voters, the affirmative is actually killing more people than he thinks he saving in that by disarming law abiding citizens across the U.S, you are leaving them prone to criminals who can by handguns from the black market, or have access to them through smuggling. My third contention is that banning handguns is unconstitutional. In 2008, in the D.C vs Heller case the supreme court ruled that the second amendment reserves the right for all citizens to purchase a handgun, and that that basic right cannot be infringed. My side has already won life, through my second contention, and also wins liberty through my current contention. By logic, when one has life and liberty, this leads to happiness which I also win as well. My fourth contention is that handguns are crucial for self-defense. 900,000 times a year, handgun owners use their guns for self-defense. Firearm ownership does have a beneficial self-defense effect. Based on a recent survey by Stanford University, the authors of one study estimated that there were 2.2-to-2.5 million defensive uses of guns annually. Another study estimated that for a period of 12 months ending in 2008, there were 503,481 incidents in which a burglar found himself confronted by an armed homeowner, and that in 98.8% of them, the intruder was successfully scared away. A third study suggests that gun-armed victims are substantially less likely than non-gun-armed victims to be injured in resisting robbery or assault. And additional evidence suggests that criminals are likely to be deterred from burglary and other crimes if they know the victim is likely to have a gun. Thank you voters for listening to me, and this is why I should win this debate.