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

You say it would be morally right to take away guns as they are the main weapon of murderers, and that murderers get their guns from people who buy them legally. I have multiple sources that say otherwise. One of them is hotair.com which states that they don't buy them from legal markets or that they steal them, but rather that they get them from others. This is seen when, "Philip J. Cook, Susan T. Parker, and Harold A. Pollack conducted interviews with criminals being held in the Cook County Jail. Their primary findings were that criminals get guns from their "social network," i.e. friends and persons known to them, but generally not from the various legal sources available to them." But you will be saying that they still get some of their guns by theft, but if they are like the countless number of illegal guns already in circulation. Also, the higher number of gun owners, the lower the local homicide rate is, according to Gary Kleck, who has a PhD in Criminology and works for Florida State University. And according to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, criminals are less likely to commit a crime if they know that the victim is armed, with a ratio of 6 out of 10 felons stating this. They even said that the same criminals are less likely to enter a house that is occupied when they plan on robbing it because they were afraid of being shot, which is smart as an unoccupied house is thousands of times safer that an occupied house is, even if it doesn't have a a gun on its premise. Gary Kleck, as mentioned above, also did a study that found that when, "In 1982, Kennesaw, GA passed a law requiring heads of households to keep at least one firearm in the house. The residential burglary rate dropped 89% the following year." Now I am no expert, but when their is a drastic change in something when something connected to it changes, that is proof for be that it works at least in that community, and should definitely be considered else where. And then there is this study by this place no one really knows about, called the United States Department of Justice, who have been vigorously fighting civil rights abuses, found in a study that criminals are more afraid of running into armed victims then the police. The Department of Justice also found that less than 10% of violent crimes involve guns of any sort, meaning that your plan of banning guns would only prevent 116,315 crimes, and still leave 1,000,000 -ish violent crimes that would not be affected. Also, fewer than 1% of all the 275 million guns will ever be used in any sort of illegal means. So that means that because roughly 100,000 guns are being used in a manner that causes harm, that every single person has to give up this right. I would understand if closer to 10-35% but the number is too small to even consider such a drastic plan. Also, the number of people who die from guns should actually be smaller because 2/3 of all people who die from guns are people who are criminals that die from other criminals. The actual number of innocent people is, if adjusted for this, closer to 10,000 a year. This is many due to the fact that gangs in Miami, New York, Los Angeles, and other major seaboard cities have fierce rivals and lead to deadly confrontations. This can be seen with the Crips and Bloods in Los Angeles who have on multiple occasions throughout the 1990's and continues to this day. I say all these sources go against what you say, especially seen you provided no links for anyone to click on, while in this round alone I have produced 8. http://www.politifact.com...-/ https://www.fbi.gov... http://www.bjs.gov... https://www.ncjrs.gov... https://americangunfacts.com... https://www.ncjrs.gov... http://criminology.fsu.edu... http://hotair.com...