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

Round 1. A. Injuries to children from firearms is largely a problem of the proliferation of handguns and the acceptance of handgun violence in our culture Phyllis F. Agran 1987 Public Health Reports "Injuries to Children: The Relationship of Child Development to Prevention Strategies" (1974-) Vol. 102, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 1987), pp. 609-610 Injuries to children from firearms is largely a problem of the proliferation of handguns and the acceptance of handgun violence in our culture. The young child is introduced to the handgun as a toy; violence with handguns is a mainstay of television drama. Moreover, there are an estimated 50 million guns in America, including tens of millions kept in households in which there are children. The young child does not understand the danger of the real object or the difference between it and a toy gun. While "playing" with the family gun, one child somehow kills another child. As for the adolescent who has grown up in our "gun culture," the handgun is all too often seen as the quick solution to conflict, and there has been increased incidence of handgun suicide and homi? cide among adolescents, ages 15-24 B. Gun ownership proves to be associated with a culture of gun violence Edward L. Glaeser and Spencer Glendon 1998 "Who Owns Guns? Criminals, Victims, and the Culture of Violence" The American Economic Review, Vol. 88, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Hundred and Tenth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May, 1998), pp. 458-462 We have four tests of the view that guns are a symptom of a "culture of private justice." First, we predict that gun ownership is higher for individuals whose peers own guns. This strategic complementarity occurs because in a fight the benefit of having a gun rises if your opponent has a gun and because the likelihood of being punished for using or having a gun declines if everyone is a gun user. Second, gun ownership should decline with police availability and confidence in the legal system. Third, following Nisbett and Cohen (1996), we expect to find a connection between a general tendency toward violent retribution and gun ownership. Fourth, since handguns provide a less visible signal, we expect to see that the three effects just described are stronger for guns generally than for handguns " The next row in the table shows that individuals who answer yes to the question "Would you approve of hitting someone who hit your child?" are more likely to own guns. Gun ownership appears to be associated with a general taste for violent retribution. The next row shows that gun ownership is negatively correlated with confidence in the Supreme Court. Gun ownership is also negatively correlated with the number of police per square mile in the state, holding overall population density constant. In the fourth row from the bottom, we see that gun-owners are less likely to believe that public officials care about them, suggesting that private and public justice appear to be substitutes C. The Weapons Effect Craig A. Anderson, Arlin J. Benjamin, Jr., and Bruce D. Bartholow 1998 "Does the Gun Pull the Trigger? Automatic Priming Effects of Weapon Pictures and Weapon Names" Psychological Science July 1998 9: 308-314, doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00061 In 1967, Berkowitz and LePage demonstrated that the presence of weapons (a rifle and a revolver) produced more retaliative aggression against an antagonist than did the presence of badminton rackets. These results, and several failures to replicate them (e.g., Page & Scheidt, 1971), led to considerable debate about the validity of the effect. But now, more than three decades later, it is clear that this "weapons effect" is real. It has been observed with knives as well as guns, with weapon pictures as well as real weapons, in field settings as well as the psychological laboratory. Early concerns that the weapons effect might be an artifact of participants" suspicion or experimenter demand have been met by studies revealing the opposite: The weapons effect occurs only when participants are not suspicious or under heavy experimenter demand (Carlson, Marcus-Newhall, & Miller, 1990; Turner, Simons, Berkowitz, & Frodi, 1977). It is clear that the presence of a weapon"or even a picture of a weapon"can make people behave more aggressively. In essence, the gun helps pull the trigger. For these reasons i urge a vote in the affirmative.