The United States Ought to Ban Firearms

This is the last round of the debate so I won"t be bringing up any *new* arguments. This round will specifically be to respond to my opponent"s rebuttals of my opening arguments. Framework Con starts by arguing against the framework of utilitarianism. Con does this by saying liberty ought to be valued higher than a utilitarian one, as in the liberty to own a gun. This argument doesn"t work because the value of life intrinsically and inherently outweighs the value of liberty; without life one cannot have liberty. Thus, if banning guns saves lives this would outweigh the value of losing the liberty to own a gun. Con elaborates upon the argument by bringing up an analogy and explaining that the government ought to honor liberty in order to prevent government tyranny. Con"s justification for this is that, "When the government no longer follows their obligation to liberty, they have stopped fulfilling their purpose." But doesn"t the government also have the obligation to life? The United States Declaration of Independence declares the purpose of government to protect life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Liberty is definitely important, but life is more important because without life one cannot attain liberty, and a life with slightly limited liberty is better than no life at all. This argument just doesn"t work because the government has a higher obligation to life than they do to liberty, and thus a utilitarian approach (which would still include liberty in the calculation) ought to still be valued. Con next brings up the self-defense rebuttal that I had last round under his framework section, so I"ll address it here as well. Con essentially argues that it would be unfair to force people to give up their right to defend themselves with a firearm in order to save lives of people committing suicide that it was not their fault in the first place that they are going to commit suicide. The problem with this logic is that it assumes that owning a gun is a right, which it's not. And Con has not made any arguments for the notion that owning a firearm is a right, and the Constitution doesn"t count since that is an appeal to authority and is/ought fallacy. Con has to explain logically how citizens have a moral right to own a firearm, not cite a source just saying that it is with no warrant behind it (such as the US Constitution.) Con hasn"t done so, thus his argument is built entirely upon an unwarranted assumption. Of which is not true, owning a gun is not a right, it's a privilege. That is because rights are guaranteed by morality, such as the right to your life. Thus violating your right to life and killing you would be immoral, or torturing you for no reason. You have rights to ways to be morally treated, but you have no right to own a gun. The closest a gun gets to a right is being a right to property, but the right to life outweighs the right to property, and regardless Con hasn"t made any argument for violation of right of property. This argument just doesn"t work because owning a gun isn"t a right, the right to life is, thus the US can definitely take away someone"s firearm in order to save lives. And the right to self-defense would exist regardless, banning firearms wouldn"t mean that people can no longer defend themselves. This is a straw man. Suicides Con argues that since suicide is a mental health issue, it doesn't make sense to solve it via gun ban. But it is irrelevant of whether it's a mental health issue, as long as a gun ban saves lives, the government ought to gun bans as it is a moral thing to do. All entities ought to act morally, the moral thing to do is gun bans, the US government ought to ban guns. Mental health is irrelevant in all of this. Con argues that my evidence shows a likelihood, not a certainty. This simply doesn"t make sense, and it ignores all of my logic that shows that banning guns would save lives. My evidence proves that firearms cause suicide and uses sound logic to prove that banning guns would save lives. None of my argument is based on likelihoods. Whether suicides are done during or after a gun ban has nothing to do with my sources. And Pro"s counter evidence runs into the correlation/causation fallacy again. Accidents The most that Con"s rebuttal amounts to is saying that the number of deaths is actually 505. Which is true, I misread the source. The amount of injuries was 15,000. As injuries still cause suffering there still is impact. Gun production Con argues that ending the production of guns wouldn"t do anything because there would still be 310 million guns circulating. But as I said in my argument, cutting off production makes guns more expensive which deters criminals from purchasing guns since most criminals are poor. Deterring criminals from getting guns is good, since a criminal without a gun will do much less harm. Con didn"t attack that premise, or the premise that cutting off manufacturing will increase prices thus the point still stands. Con argues that people have made firearms privately before without citing a single instance. This isn"t true because firearms require manufacturing to make. Homemade firearms take *extreme* skill and time to gather all of the resources needed and have special tools to craft the barrel, and special tools to have the bullet fit perfectly in the barrel. All of this requires factories, making homemade firearms will result in those firearms being of very low quality and thus not dangerous. Even if an effective firearm is able to be manufactured privately it will take incredibly long amounts of time, cost to gather the resources, and skill to craft it. The creator thus has to charge a high price of it which would deter criminals from purchasing it, and this would be rare, thus still significantly decreasing the new income of firearms in the market thus raising prices of firearms and deterring criminals from getting them. Banning firearms significantly reduces the income of new firearms, thus making the existing firearms more rare and thus more expensive, deterring criminals from getting them. Even if a select few are still able to make them, the income is still significantly reduced since firearms can no longer be made in large quantities.