The the right to carry concealed semi-automatic weapons should not be infringed.

I find it interesting that my opponent has used a Supreme Court case as evidence of the "individual right" the Second Amendment affords to American Citizens. The case referred to, District of Columbia v. Heller, does indeed assert the individual right of citizens to possess a handgun for self defense; however, it is equally as important to note that this case was not decided unanimously. In a 5-4 decision, which the Court used textual and historical evidence to decide the original application of the Second Amendment, Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer all applied the same textual and historical examination of the Second Amendment, but came to a very different conclusion than the majority. This case does not prove any conclusive evidence for the original intent of the Second Amendment, it was only the interpretations of the nine Justices on the Supreme Court at the time. I realize that decision by the Supreme Court have the binding ability of law, or the "correct" interpretation of the Constitution, but it is also true that the entire Judicial Review power of the Supreme Court is not found in the Constitution; it was a product of the Courts decisions in Marbury v. Madison, and Cooper v. Aaron. I included the chart on the Washington post's website to respond to my opponents argument "in countries with organized governments where firearm ownership is higher, not only are the people more liberated, but crime among the civilian population is lower," which shows that there is no higher gun ownership than the United States. The debate to crime differences overall must be omitted, being that the chart only provides information about gun violence and crime. But since my opponent spent a large part of their rebuttal giving examples and comparisons based upon this data, I will respond to it as well. Being that I find a fundamental flaw in the examples and comparisons given, I will address the comparisons as a whole, instead of responding to them individually. The overall objection I have is the incompatibility of the countries that are being compared as examples. I will use the resource "democracyranking.org" as evidence of the generally accepted rankings and theoretical approach to calculating the "quality of Democracy = (freedom & other characteristics of the political system) & (performance of the non-political dimensions)." The website lays out its ranking system as such "all indicators are transformed to a value range of 1 to 100, where "1 represents the weakest (poorest) and 100 the strongest (best) value." If you look at the rankings, a few interesting factors arise. First, Sierra Leon is not on the list. This is because this website only uses countries that are categorized by Freedom House as either "free" or "partly free." Is this not a telling indication that the comparison of Sierra Leon and the United States may not be the best? The United States is categorized by Freedom house as completely free, with a "democracy score" of 76.9; where as Sierra Leon is not even included because it isn't a "free" or "partly free state." This has to be taken into account when comparing the gun homicides in each country. The Brazil comparison is indeed a better one, but is still in the "medium 2/3" of all countries on the democracy ranking site. Would it not be more advantageous to compare apple with apples? When looking at the top 10 on the democracy rating compared to the United States on the Washington Post website, the U.S. is number one in gun ownership as previously stated, and Switzerland is third. Although Switzerland has a higher total gun homicide rate of 72.2 compared to the U.S. 67.5, the total number of gun homicides in each becomes relevant to examine. This is where the biggest jump in data between the top 10 "democracies" and the United States happens. Switzerland had a total of 57 homicides by gun, compared to the United States at 9,960. Of the top 10 "democracies" on the democracy ranking website, the next highest number besides the U.S. is Germany with 158. We have to travel over 30 spots on the total homicides by guns to reach our first top 10 "democracy." There is a 9,802 difference between the United States and Germany of total homicides by gun. This cannot be due to nothing. In summary, there is a heck of a lot of data to sift through and attempt to determine what is important and what is not. The statistical significance of these categories would take far to much time and effort to exert for this debate, so I present all this information only to illuminate the inconsistencies in comparisons and other possible factors leading to the numbers presented on the Washington Post. I don't not contest the necessity of citizens protecting themselves by the use of guns, but to say that they are used only for this purpose would be absurd, that is evidenced by the number of homicides by guns in the U.S. on the Washington Post's website. Keeping and bearing arms for the soul purpose to defend against tyrannical governments or over oppressive governments may indeed be necessary, but that would suggest a cynical view of our government, and the assumption that this tyrannical government will arise at some point. There are plenty of people in Congress that share the views of my opponent, and I would highly doubt they would allow for a tyrannical government to take hold of our country. If we have no faith in our government and its ability to protect and provide for its citizens, then we are having the wrong debate. https://freedomhouse.org... http://democracyranking.org... http://www.washingtonpost.com...