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

I will start with the criterion, health. If I can fulfill this criterion I win the debate. Moving on to my points. P1: Handguns kill. Handguns are the main suspect involving firearm deaths, and of all firearm related crime ever, handguns have been involved more than 85% of the time. Statistics from the Violence Policy Center show that handguns were used in 650,000 of the 1 million gun deaths since 1962. These deaths are made up mostly of homicide and suicide. Subpoint A - Homicide. Handguns were used in 55.6% of the more than 110,000 homicides from 1990 to 1997, more than all other weapons combined in that period. On average, if someone is shot and killed, it will 4 out of 5 times be handguns. A specific example of this is in 1997, where handguns accounted for 79.4% of all firearm related deaths. Other countries, because of their restriction on handguns, have much, much less handgun death. The U. S. has over 10,000 gun homicides, compared to Canada"s less than 200, Germany, Italy, and France"s less than 100, and Japan"s less than 50. This proves that homicide is extremely bad, but if we ban handguns, homicide will dramatically decrease. Subpoint B - Suicide. Handgun homicide is very present and extremely bad, but suicide is actually the largest category in firearms fatality. The deadly link between handgun ownership and suicide was decisively established in a 1999 study of California handgun purchasers showing that the suicide rate during the first week after the purchase of a handgun is 57 times higher than for the population as a whole. During the first year after purchase, suicide remained the leading cause of death among handgun purchasers. 6 out of 10 times suicides are committed with a handgun, and in fact, handguns are used twice as often as shotguns and rifles for suicide, according to the Violence Policy Center. People living in households containing handguns are nearly five times as likely to commit suicide compared to households not containing handguns. This happens because handguns are an immediate suicide weapon, being easy to use and have. Many people who live with handguns commit suicide before even thinking about it, and that leads to young men and women who could have lived great lives not thinking about their decisions and committing suicide immediately because they can do it so quickly. Moving on to my second point. P2: Handguns promote a culture of gun violence. Many parents of young children have handguns, which makes kids numb to the violence that the handgun creates. There have been many situations in which handguns were in the household and children used them, whether purposely or accidentally, to kill and injure others. An example of this is a three-year-old boy in Cleveland, Ohio who shot and killed a one-year-old boy after picking up a handgun that had been left unattended inside a home on April 12, 2015. The infant was rushed to hospital with a gunshot wound to the head but was later pronounced dead, reports the Associated Press. Investigators were trying to determine where the gun came from, Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams told reporters. Williams said there was at least one adult home when the incident happened. "It"s a sad day for Cleveland," said Williams. "This fascination that we have with handguns, not just in this city but in this country, has to stop. This is a senseless loss of life. " To explain this is Phyllis F. Agran, who says in his book, "Injuries to Children: The Relationship of Child Development to Prevention Strategies" Injuries to children from firearms is largely a problem of the proliferation of handguns and the acceptance of handgun violence in our culture. 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.