Firearms licences should not be granted to members of the public

"People are entitled to defend their homes and families, of course, but allowing them to use firearms to do so makes the householder the judge, jury and executioner of an intruder. The penalty for burglary is rightly severe, but it is not the death penalty. Whatever punishment is handed down to an offender should be the responsibility of the courts, not the victim." I would agree that it is not the proper recourse to kill an obviously unarmed intruder who does not initiate force. However, not ever situation is as clear cut as the ones my opponent has listed. Despite the fact that my opponent agrees that people are entitled to defend their homes, he is implying that firearms are incapable of being used outside of extremes. This could not be farther from the truth; most defensive firearm uses end without a single shot fired. In the vast majority of cases, simply drawing arms de-escalates the situation, causing the instigator to either surrender or flee. Since my opponent does not seem to have a problem with self defense through necessity, it seems that he is not strictly against the use of firearms for self defense, rather he apposes Castle Doctrine. This is not the only doctrine that allows for firearm self defense use. Duty to retreat doctrines require the property owner to retreat from the suspect, and then announce their intent to fire. In many variations of this doctrine, for a shooting to be legally justified, the assailant must show intent to cause harm or mortal injury. Thus, use of a firearm in this situation would bear little difference from using an edged weapon in a similar defensive situation. Granting civilians the ability to bear arms does not inherently give them the right to exorcise lethal force at their personal discretion. "For example, if an intruder believes that there is a possibility that the householder may be armed, he is likely to raise the stakes by going in tooled up himself. Indeed, a burglar may even pre-empt an armed response by hunting down the occupants of the property and shooting them in order to enable him to carry out the robbery unmolested." I would ask for some type of source for this assertion, as it runs contrary to my own research. In the Unites States, burglars are much less likely to willfully come into contact with the residents of homes than in Canada or Britain, which have much more strict gun laws and lower gun ownership. Many surveys of convicted felons and burglars seem to confirm the fact that criminals fear gun encounters and will avoid them when possible. http://catb.org... http://www.guncite.com... "Of course, householders are aware of this and, as a consequence, are often unable to rest easy in their own homes at night." I would again ask for some type of source or citation, as this also run contrary to what I have gathered. I consistently find that those who own and or carry firearms are much less likely to be the victims of violent crime. http://www.guncite.com... "More generally, crimes such as drive-by shootings are difficult to execute without guns, as are armed robberies. More mundanely, pub fights are less violent when the weapons are pool cues and broken bottles rather than, say Glock 26's and Walther PP's." I would like to address these two separate points. On the subject of drive by shootings, most, if not all are the result of gang and drug violence. The idea of reducing drive by shootings through gun control depends on two assumptions: That banning guns will not result in equally violent alternatives (Stabbings), and that gun control will be effective in keeping illegal arms out of the hands of criminals. I have already addressed the first issue in my previous argument, and I do not believe that even total banning of firearms will prevent those who want them from acquiring them. A brief look at statistical evidence in Britain will show that there are over a million illegal weapons in circulation. Even if one were to somehow entirely cut off the supply of weapons from external sources and gradually chip away at the conventional weapons in circulation, it is unlikely that the problem would resolve itself. History has shown that relatively sophisticated firearms can be produced from even the most basic of materials and tools. The best example that I know of would be the British Sten submachin-gun, developed during WWII to satisfy the dire need for wartime weapons. In face of a limited industrial arms complex, small time factories with limited experience were able produce these weapons in massive quantities. The simplicity of this weapon led it to be adopted by the Polish resistance, who produced it illegally by contracting each individual part out to a legitimate factory. "Due to the simplicity of design, local production of Polish variants of Sten was started in at least 23 underground workshops in Poland. Some of them produced copies of Mark IIs, while others produced the so-called Polski Sten. The Polski Sten made in Warsaw under command of Ryszard Białostocki were built from a number of legal elements made in official factories or acquired through other means. The main body of the machine pistol was made from hydraulic cylinders produced for hospital equipment. All the pistols were marked in English to disguise their origin and the production facilities." While the production of rag tag weapons is limited in modern times, a total ban would likely revive the market for such weapons. Considering that fully automatic and semi automatic weapons are almost identical in cost when government sanctions are in place for both types of weapons, the result may actually be an increase of fully automatic weapons on the streets. http://en.wikipedia.org... http://en.wikipedia.org...