We Should Not Ban Assault Weapons or High Capacity Magazines

1. Source problems: For the Brady Center link, this may work better: http://www.brianfrosh.com.... If not, please play around with the Brady Center website. I will continue to look for the link myself. As for my alleged plagiarism, first of all, my opponent"s first link I cited in my first argument. It was the first source: http://www.iop.harvard.edu.... As for the second accusation, I was merely using pro"s arguments as help for my own debate. That is where I got one of those sources, and that paragraph was a paraphrasing of my source 2. Now as for the criticism of my usefulness of assault weapons argument, my opponent cites that it is a violation of liberty. However, allowing assault weapons will actually decrease liberty in the long run. "Even the claim that banning assault weapons would limit Americans" freedoms is largely unsubstantiated. If anything, I"d argue the reverse. Legalized high-powered weaponry forces public safety agencies, mainly the FBI, to attempt to monitor more civilian activity."1 2. Assault Weapons Only Bans Do Work According to the FBI"s handbook on gun regulations, an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle based loosely on the military"s M-16, "will fire automatically merely by manipulation of the selector or removal of the disconnector." With relative ease, assault rifles can be made to mimic weapons of war. Their potential for destruction is staggering.1 Take, for example, the massacre in Aurora. Despite the limited time, Holmes killed twelve viewers and injured fifty-eight others. Scarier still, Holmes" .223 caliber assault weapon, a semi-automatic AR-15, jammed during the shooting. When we hear about the massacre in Aurora, we must remember only twelve were killed. An AR-15 is capable of carrying a 100-round drum magazine and of shooting between 50 and 60 bullets per minute. It"s incredibly fortunate more lives were not lost.1 Banning assault weapons would take out a set of guns that are extremely dangerous compared to guns such as handguns and ordinary hunting rifles. 3. Assault Weapons Bans Lower Crime A Justice Department study of the assault weapons ban found that it was responsible for a 6.7% decrease in total gun murders, holding all other factors equal. The same study also found that "Assault weapons are disproportionately involved in murders with multiple victims, multiple wounds per victim, and police officers as victims."2, 3 The 1994 ban, according to a Department of Justice review, also appears to have caused the percentage of crimes involving assault weapons in some major US cities to drop from 72 percent to 17 percent.4, 5 The expiration of the federal law, on this paper"s model, has gotten roughly 239 people killed on the Mexican border per year since 2004. This is consistent with another paper that found "the expiration of the AWB is responsible for at least 16.4 percent of the increase in the homicide rate in Mexico between 2004 and 2008."4, 6 Moreover, when you compare different states with different gun laws at the same time, you find states with tighter gun regulations (including assault weapon bans) have significantly lower rates of firearm death. This suggests that, independent of whatever good fortune the United States has seen the past decade, better gun laws could significantly accelerate decline in lives lost to gunfire.4 Overall, the 1994 ban on assault weapons did lower crime. 3. Assault Weapons Bans Solve the Crime Problem The reality is that even a minor percentage decline in fatalities could means hundreds of fewer people killed per year. Estimates about the percentage of crimes involving assault weapons range from two to eight percent. But if the Feinstein law could make a dent in that number, that"s still a big deal. Consider one estimate, based on federal gun trace data, that the original federal assault weapons ban reduced the national percentage of gun crimes involving assault weapons from about five percent to about two percent. Assuming that, because assault weapons are rarer and deadlier and hence more likely to be responsible for homicides, this translated to a one percent decline in the homicide rate. That"s 110 fewer murders per year given the roughly 11,000 Americans killed by gun homicide every year. We can debate whether would-be murderers would simply use other types of guns, and whether they"d be as deadly, but the point is that even a small percentage drop in gun homicides nationwide would be a huge victory.4 Works Cited 1 http://www.iop.harvard.edu... 2 Jeffrey A. Roth & Christopher S. Koper, "Impact Evaluation of the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994," (March 1997). 3 http://www.feinstein.senate.gov... 4 http://thinkprogress.org... 5 http://www.sas.upenn.edu... 6 http://themonkeycage.org...#