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The U.S. should enact a ban on semi-automatic firearms

Debate Information

Position: For
July 2018 Tournament | Quarter Finals - Debate 1




Debra AI Prediction

Against
Predicted To Win
56%
Likely
44%
Unlikely

Details +




Debate Type: Traditional Debate



Voting Format: Moderate Voting

Opponent: blamonkey

Rounds: 3

Time Per Round: 24 Hours Per Round


Voting Period: 24 Hours


Forfeited



Post Argument Now Debate Details +



    Arguments


  • Round 1 | Position: Against
    blamonkeyblamonkey 66 Pts   -  

    Thank you for accepting this debate. I hope I pose a challenge to someone who has already won a tournament.  Without further ado, I negate the resolution: Resolved: The US should enact a ban on semi-automatic firearms.

    Before my case, I offer the following framework.

    Framework

    For any debate discussing the implementation of policy, we must adhere to Consequentialism, (which is closely related to Utilitarianism). This is a philosophical theory suggesting that an action ought to be judged by the consequences of said action (1). For instance, if policy “x” causes the most benefits to the people while producing scant negative effects, policy “x” should be passed. Measuring policy success needs to be based on how it serves the people it is supposed to help.

    To better fulfill these consequentialist ideals, I offer the following counter plan to my opponent’s advocacy.

    CP: Strengthening Regulation

    I offer the following plan:

    a.       Increase spending on police agencies. This can be accomplished through a $4 billion in categorical grants to each state specifically to increased personnel and training. Investigative bodies that frequently check licensed dealers and gun shows must be maintained.

    It should come as no surprise that shrinking police budgets would influence enforcement of gun laws. The multitude of impacts because of scarce funds certainly decreases the amount of people on the force. During the 2008 economic downturn, budget sequesters happened in manifold state programs across the country, including police departments. This is rationalized by Tracy Gordon of the Brookings Institute in December of 2012. She points out that the economic downturn fueled a decrease in tax revenue due to lower property taxes, state-income taxes etc. In fact, even when factoring in government programs to help states struggling with lack of funding, from 2009 to 2012 states faced more than $500 billion in cumulative budget shortfalls (2). States had to cut somewhere to make up the shortfall, and to balance the budget, police departments lost out. The Police Executive Research Forum performed 2 surveys on police agencies. One was conducted in 2010, and the other was conducted in 2012. The goal was to see how police departments dealt with the loss in revenue. In both surveys, it was found that 23% of responding police agencies had implemented layoffs to deal with the shortfall and 45% had recently implemented hiring freezes (3). Without adequate enforcement, crime increased dramatically. Rutgers professor James Keefe writes for the Economic Policy Institute in 2011 and found that in the 5 cities analyzed, (Camden, Irving, Newark, Paterson, and Trenton,) it was estimated that while the cities saved over $28 million because of police layoffs, and yet the expected response would be 34 more murders, 290 more aggravated assaults, 549 more burglaries, and 527 more robberies (4).

    While one may accurately point out that we are nowhere near the year 2008 today, there should be reason to believe that the problems discussed concerning the availability of staff will manifest itself again. Vox reports on the 2019 budget proposed by Trump which proposed a cut of 50% to the current COPS hiring program which started in 1994 and aimed to redeploy or hire 100,000 new officers over 6 years. It was immensely popular and has been renewed till today (5). These cuts as well as the lackluster growth in police budgets deteriorates enforcement of current gun control laws. A Kansas City newspaper illustrates the issue perfectly, with a municipality considering budget cuts which would eliminate 30 positions within the police force (6). This is happening to Trenton, Lansing, and Buffalo as well (7) (8) (9). Without being able to deter crime through our police presence, respond to gun crime to save lives, or enforce the law by arresting criminals, we restrict our success in dealing with gun violence, or violent crime in general in the US.

    My opponent’s plan of simply putting in place a new law will be ineffective in dealing with the gun violence within the nation. Even if another weapons ban were put in place, there is no reason to believe that without any enforcement that gun crime will disappear. A law is only as effective as the executive body which enforces the law effectively. My plan solves for this by increasing police presence which decreases crime through deterrence and increases the number of responders to gun violence in the US.

    b.       Tighten regulation by mandating a minimum sentence of 20 years for straw-gun purchases. Also, dealers caught encouraging or intentionally allowing straw-gun purchases to occur will be given a 20-year sentence as well. Prosecutors will be heavily encouraged via memos to prosecute these cases. Frequent inspection by ATF members will occur in suspected dealers that allow straw-gun purchasing.

    Straw-gun purchasing is the act of buying a gun via a proxy i.e. giving my best friend money to buy myself a gun if the recipient of the weapon is ineligible to buy a gun. This tactic is used to circumvent the system of regulations set in place. The proxy would be the one that is subject to the background check, not the recipient of the weapon. While illegal, this practice is not heavily discouraged. In fact, the San Bernardino shooter used this very method to acquire his firearm through a friend (10). One may wonder why the law is generally ineffective. This is due to the lack of prosecutor’s power when attempting to prove whether one of these straw purchases took place. Alex Yablon writes for The Trace and contacted a multitude of experts from the ATF who explain that for the prosecutor, it is hard to prove that a straw-gun purchase happened, and judges are too lenient on the defendant’s punishment (11). The mandatory minimum solves both issues. The John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in January of 2018 found that prosecutions in Pennsylvania for violating the state’s straw-gun purchasing laws increased nearly 16-fold after a mandatory minimum was put into place. This is because prosecutors often will use mandatory minimums to force guilty pleas. NPR explains that mandatory minimums allow the prosecutor to bring certain charges with possibly less time served if defendants were to plead guilty to their crime, which is why a great proportion of trials in the US end this way (12).

    The prevalence of straw-gun purchases for criminal activity cannot be understated. The Giffords Law Center’s fact shows the following

    “An ATF study of 1,530 gun trafficking cases determined that straw purchasers were involved in almost one-half (46%) of the investigations, and were associated with nearly 26,000 illegally trafficked firearms.

    Subsequent ATF investigations at gun shows also uncovered “widespread” straw purchasing from gun dealers, where guns were diverted to “convicted felons and local and international gangs.”

    Moreover, when city officials from NY in 2009 conducted investigation at a gun show looking for dealers who would feel comfortable to sell a gun to a straw purchaser, 94% were found to be willing to do so (13).

    This is likely part of the reason that legal weapons find their way into the hands of criminals and on the black market. The ATF study from 2000 also reported that 1% of federally licensed firearm dealers accounted for over 60% of the guns that are found at crime scenes. All the while, the dealers were the biggest contributor to weapons that were diverted to the black market, often through trafficking and straw gun purchases (14). Thus, frequent and intermittent investigations into suspected dealers would likely decrease the number of guns on the black market and fueling gangs, murderers etc.

    My opponent’s plan of banning the guns only drives the arms market underground and away from government regulation. In fact, a BJS report from 2001 found that almost 80% of criminals surveyed reported receiving their most recent firearm from an illegal source or a friend/ family member (15). Criminals are already accessing a large, unchecked market of guns that are widely available. However, my plan will eliminate a great proportion of gun trafficking and gun crime via the penalties of straw gun purchasing being well enforced, deterring criminals, and by investigating those that may have sold weapons to people illegally. Because of the expanded police force, arrests can also occur for egregious violators of straw-gun purchasing law.

    c.       Alter the definition of being adjudicated as a mental defective which prevents someone from owning a weapon by including a requirement that those purchasing a weapon must have been evaluated by a psychiatrist within the past 3 years before buying the gun. Additional restrictions to purchasing a weapon include diagnoses of personality disorders, or any type of diagnoses that describes the patient as aggressive, violent etc.

    There is admittedly no fool-proof way of determining who will become a threat to society when given a gun. However, there are strides that the government can take to ascertain that mentally incapable people will not purchase weapons. Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute offers the legal perspective on what qualifies someone as adjudicated as a mental defective. Essentially, one must be determined to be mentally incapable to possess a gun as determined by a court, or, they must be institutionalized against their will (16). These two stipulations leave out a generous portion of people who may be a threat to those around them with a gun. For example, as Duke Health News points out, nearly 10% of adults have impulsive anger issues and access to a gun (17). People who suffer from these types of issues are unlikely to fall under the requirements that prohibit sales to them. Adding a licensed psychiatrist into the equation would bring about better results as more people are diagnosed with conditions that prevent the purchase of a weapon. Frequent criticisms of policies such as this claim that mental illness does not influence crime at all. While I will agree that bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, anxiety, and autism will rarely compel people to kill others, irrational and angry behavior is emblematic of troubled behavior for a firearm-owning adult. Everytown Research for Gun Safety in their November 2017 study recounted instances of mass shootings from the year 2009 till 2016 and found that 42% of mass shooters exhibited “red flags” including acts of violence, threats of violence, and substance abuse (18).  Clearly, not all shooters are going to suffer from anger issues. However, by changing the current system that allows many to buy weapons without being mentally capable of possessing said weapon, we will see mass shootings dissipate.

    Under my opponent’s plan, we do not necessarily see a dip in mass shootings. In fact, a complete ban of only semi-automatic weapons would allow for switching from one weapon to another. An analysis by Christopher Koper after the ban on assault style weapons in 1994 concluded that while there was a slight dip in assault weapons being used in crime, this was largely offset by an increase in the use of high-capacity magazines and other guns (19). The only difference we see under my opponent’s plan is the procurement of other styles of weapons after the semi-automatic weapon ban is enacted.

    d.       Stolen firearms should be immediately reported to police agencies or be subject to no more than 5 years in prison

    Stolen weapons have inadvertently allowed violence to flourish in the US. Brian Freskos of The Trace in 2017 reports on the findings of a year-long investigation on a portion of guns stolen and used in crimes between 2010 and 2016. The study concluded that there were 23,000 guns reported stolen between info from The Trace and a dozen local news agencies which caused more than 1,500 car jackings and kidnappings, countless sexual assaults, and numerous murders (20). The actual number of stolen weapons is higher than 23,000, or even 50,000. A study from Harvard published in the Injury Epidemiology journal in 2017 looked at a nationally representative survey and estimated that 380,000 guns are stolen each year (21). People do not typically report these crimes as much as they should, with reporting of these crimes only totaling 240,000 different incidents in 2016. This may be primarily because only 11 states require people to file a police report when their gun is stolen (22). When not reported, many of these weapons are funneled into the black market, and eventually, are found at crime scenes. By addressing how firearms find their way into the irresponsible hands of criminals, we can finally start seeing crime plummet, which is unique to my plan. My opponent has advocated for an inefficient solution through another blanket-ban on firearms that will not lead to any sizable decrease in crime for an easily understood reason: the law would not target a gargantuan number of crime guns that are left without scrutiny.

    Conclusion

    My plan encompasses enforcement and provisions that are better at decreasing gun violence when compared to a simple ban on certain weapons. As I have already proven, the lack of enforcement, focus on firearms used in crime, and the ability for criminals to switch their method of killing poses multiple problems for the affirmation. Strengthening regulation and enforcement of current laws will prove to be a better option when considering a ban on all semi-automatic weapons.

    Sources

    1. http://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/consequentialism
    2. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/state-and-local-budgets-and-the-great-recession/
    3. https://tinyurl.com/ycucx68f
    4. https://www.epi.org/files/temp2011/BriefingPaper314.pdf
    5. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/12/17004432/trump-budget-police-cops-hiring-2019
    6. https://www.kshb.com/news/region-missouri/raytown/raytown-police-chief-if-budget-cuts-approved-17-officers-will-lose-jobs
    7. http://newjersey.news12.com/story/34875385/layoffs-loom-for-trenton-police
    8. http://wkar.org/post/layoffs-are-beginning-lansing-police#stream/0
    9. http://news.wbfo.org/post/police-and-fire-layoffs-have-adverse-effect
    10. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/san-bernardino-shooting/friend-who-bought-guns-san-bernardino-shooter-plead-guilty-n721001
    11. https://www.thetrace.org/2015/08/straw-purchases-law-atf-gun/
    12. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/12/05/248893775/report-threat-of-mandatory-minimums-used-to-coerce-guilty-pleas
    13. http://lawcenter.giffords.org/gun-laws/policy-areas/crime-guns/trafficking-straw-purchasing/
    14. http://lawcenter.giffords.org/gun-traffickingprivate-sales-statistics/
    15. https://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fuo.pdf
    16. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/478.11
    17. https://corporate.dukehealth.org/content/nearly-1-10-adults-has-impulsive-anger-issues-and-access-guns
    18. https://everytownresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Analysis_of_Mass_Shooting_062117.pdf
    19. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/204431.pdf
    20. https://www.thetrace.org/features/stolen-guns-violent-crime-america/
    21. https://injepijournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40621-017-0109-8#Sec5
    22. https://www.thetrace.org/2017/11/stolen-guns-reporting-requirements/

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Agility_Dude
  • Round 1 | Position: For
    someone234someone234 647 Pts   -   edited July 2018

    NOTE: Click on sources as needed. Click the number in the brackets.

    Definitions and Outline

    I will be using British (I believe 'true') English in this debate except in my quotes of non-British-English sources.
    I know it's the responsibility of the Proposition (Prop) to define terms and outline the debate's framework but my opponent decided to go first, which is fine by me as it's just a case of 'house rule' variation across debate sites where DebateIsland says anyone can go first in any round in this format but what I want to just 'clean up' for my opponent to ensure the audience is crystal clear on the matter is what precisely a semi-automatic firearm is.

    So, it's clear US means the United States (of America) for this debate. The rest of the words are fairly obvious although the word 'ban' is going to be a huge part of this debate for both sides and is what I'm going to elaborate on the how and why withing this debate. Let's just give good dictionary definition of 'ban' before being exact about semi-automatic firearms and following that I'll move onto my case.

    Ban - Officially or legally prohibit (something).
    https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ban

    Semi-Automatic Firearm - 
    1) (of a firearm) automatically ejecting the cartridge case of a fired shot and loading the next cartridge fromthe magazine but requiring a squeeze of the trigger to fire each individual shot.
    http://www.dictionary.com/browse/semiautomatic
    2) of a firearm : able to fire repeatedly through an automatic reloading process but requiring release and another pressure of the trigger for each successive shot
    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/semiautomatic
    3) "In simplest terms, "semi-automatic" refers to any firearm designed to fire one bullet with one trigger squeeze, then automatically reload the chamber with a cartridge from a magazine and be ready to fire again.

    The term applies to a whole range of modern firearms, from hunting and target rifles all the way up to so-called black rifles that look like what a soldier would carry. Gun control arguments often focus on the black rifles, but the differences between those and any other semi-automatic rifle often are only cosmetic. Semi-automatic guns all largely operate the same way."
    https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/oct/02/difference-between-automatic-and-semi-automatic-we/


    Basically, semi-automatic firearm is actually a normal gun. It's the kind of firearm where you can't hold it go 'pew pew pew'.

    There is one exception to this concept and again this is not what's in the debate but 'assault weapons' are weapons where the weapon can definitely fire both in automatic and semi-automatic modes (some even allow a third way of setting the weapon to fire in three round bursts). That's right, you can actually set assault weapons such as the AK-47 to fire semi-automatic but that's not the kind of weapon in this debate. This debate is (and my opponent will be happy I don't mislead) only about guns where one pull on the trigger (no matter how long it's held down) fires one bullet so long as the gun is built correctly.
    https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/semi-automatic-gun-assault-weapon-definitions

    On top of those 2 definitions, let's just be clear on which context of 'should' the 'should' in this debate is.

    Should - used in auxiliary function to express obligation, propriety, or expediency.
    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/should
    I wish to explicitly point out that this debate is about if the ban should happen, it is neither if it would be easy to achieve nor if it is going to happen despite the belief that it should not. I notice my opponent is heavily relying on feasibility arguments and while I'll counter them, it is going to be Prop's case that this debate's outline is for the correctness of the ban not the practicality of the ban which is a lesser element to this debate. I do not agree with the outline my opponent proposes where I must give a detailed plan alone and let the likelihood of it being carried out or the ease with which the implementation occurs be the way I win (or lose) this debate. Prop's case is that the ban should occur and Opp's case is that it should not, as opposed to will not.

    This debate isn't if policy X has more benefits than policy Y and is actually also not a debate about whether policy X has more drawbacks than policy Y either. They are parts of it but the debate is if the ban should or should not happen, not if the ban is in and of itself the single best solution. I understand that it does matter for me to counter the suggestions of Opp and for Opp to prove that the banning of semi-automatic firearms is counterproductive as well as immoral so as to say it 'should not' be done but it is a poor portrayal of the burden of proof in this debate to say that I have to prove that the banning of semi-automatic firearms is the single best way to deal with them in order to win. It does matter which has more benefits weighed up with the risks as well as guaranteed drawbacks of each but it also matters what is morally imperative or not for the government to do for its people's safety which is a significant element missing from the framework offered by Opp. You cannot predict every single consequence because even if the universe is deterministic we do not possess enough 'pure prediction' capacity as a human being and with our current state of technology to perfectly predict the future, instead estimation is all we have to go by and morals cannot ever be fully rooted in consequence but in weighed analysis of the consequences going this way or that without true certainty of extent or alteration of odds further down the line.

    Introduction

    Just to be crystal clear here, I didn't cheat my opponent or indirectly trick him/her into going 'first'. They messaged me and I truly was busy in real life, didn't reply and they posted first before I could stop it. Due to that, I had to take some more time than the original deadline as I had to add rebuttals. I want to make it clear that there was no dirty play on my part. Let's get on with my constructive and I'll go into some holes in the Opposition's (Opp's) case later on.

    The fact is, and I say this with the utmost severity, that when it comes to laws regarding weapons it's quite hilarious that the side labelled 'liberal' is the one against semi-automatic firearm rights/access and the one labelled 'conservative' want everyone who is not deemed mentally ill or retarded (clinically) to be able to access these weapons. It is not a matter of 'liberty' at all and that's why the sides were able to take the opposite stance on the matter because this is a matter of public decency and protection! Even if we operate with the mentality that 'well if anyone may be able to get a semi-automatic firearm and the trade goes underground if made illegal we'd be better off letting everyone get a pew-pew' then we are conceding that the police, either due to insufficient-funding, laziness or lack of strategy (the lack of funding may be due to the lack of coherent strategy) are simply rendered incompetent at the prevention of semi-automatic firearms.

    The fact of the matter is that, aside from a strange artistic interest in semi-automatic firearms (or hobby of collecting firearm models for whatever recreational reason) you get a semi-automatic firearm with three motives in mind as an American civilian citizen:

    1) Hunting of non-human animals (yes, this will be an exception to the ban potentially in a state with a lot of forest or whatever else and I'll come to hunting licences later)
    2) To murder a human being... For whatever reason.
    3) To stop people with reason 2 in mind and who have a semi-automatic firearm, in order to not automatically lose the fight due to how lethal a semi-automatic firearm is.

    Without further ado, I shall begin the case to prove that the US should enact a ban on civilian semi-automatic firearm access (which may end up extending to police force but this is not the debate and is not hypocritical which I'll get to later).

    Prop's Case to Prove That the US Should Enact a Ban on Semi-Automatic Firearms


    I believe the best way to discuss the banning of guns in the US is to explore the Constitution which the gun-rights activists so fervently wave around (along with the American flag) to highlight and ignoring of the culture and "Americanism" in the spirit of the pro-gun-control campaign. I intend to not only clear up confusion but to actually prove that it is the gun-rights proponents whom have misunderstood the Second Amendment.

    Let's first establish a simple idea, the Constitution was never meant to be irreversible or absolute but simply something one should heavily consider before amending. The evidence of the latter is something the Gun Rights activists agree with... Simply put, they agree that the Constitution was intended to be weighed heavily and amended with tender care if at all. I'll give a couple of quotes to highlight just how important it is to US culture and policy making and then go on to explore what the Second Amendment is referring to and how it's not relevant to this debate.

    The following quote is from a reliable source's[1] answer to the question 'Is the Constitution Important?'
    "The first thing I would tell your students when they ask this question, is that as citizens of the United States of America, we don’t have one single thing that binds us all together except our Constitution. We are not a single ethnic group, we are not a single religious group, and we don’t have a very extensive history as a people.

    I would also tell them that throughout history, it is the exception, rather than the rule, that individuals of different ethnic and religious groups can live together peacefully. But our Constitution enshrines the principle that government exists to protect the rights of all citizens, and has no legitimate power to deprive any citizen or class of citizen of their rights without due process of law. Our country, under the Constitution, has been more successful than most in allowing individuals of different ethnic and religious groups to live together peacefully; and when we have failed, it has been because of the failures of citizens to respect the equality of all under the Constitution, or the failures of public officials to respect just limits on power.

    Finally, I would tell them that in a country as large as ours, it is literally impossible for any one individual, or agency, or government to know all there is to know in order to ensure the safety and happiness of the people. Our Constitution recognizes this, and therefore guarantees the principles of individual libertylimited government, and federalism. Federalism simply says that we trust the people in the states to govern themselves, but our national government should have the power to do things that states could not do on their own – like defend from foreign invasion or establish and regulate a national currency and otherwise make it easy for people to do business with one another across state lines."

    Another source[2] essentially defined the Constitution of the US of A as the following:

    "... the fundamental law of the U.S. federal system of government and a landmark document of the Western world. The oldest written national constitution in use, the Constitution defines the principal organs of government and their jurisdictions and the basic rights of citizens."

    So, we can agree that it's a very important document and that it would matter what is said in the Second Amendment when convincing people that in the nation of the US, a/multiple policy/ies that would ban semi-automatic firearms should be passed.

    The issue that the entire context of the Second Amendment isn't about citizens ever being armed specifically to combat criminals with better arms. No, actually it is very specifically in the context of combating the government itself (which would make its tyranny legal if it were to act in the way that's implied) and being armed to do so (which actually should be interpreted to even be accessing the information to be able to do so). Before I quote the Second Amendment and prove that this is the correct interpretation, I am going to just point out a very significant aspect of tyranny that is extremely relevant to highlighting that the Second Amendment should not be wielded by the Gun Rights group against the Gun-Control group in the context of this debate:

    If, ever, the Government was so powerful that it demanded violence towards itself in order to liberate the populace, they would ban semi-automatic firearms and essentially any tool of any kind that could be used against them. The idea that them banning semi-automatic firearms is a violation of the Second Amendment ignores the fact that the populace would always, inevitably need to illegally access arms if the Government had become truly tyrannical and ignored the Second Amendment as well as many other part of the Constitution so as to demand revolt and violent sabotage of its regime. There is never going to be a scenario of acting out the Second Amendment where the populace will be legally accessing semi-automatic... If they are allowed to access semi-automatic firearms that would only ever be because the tyrannical Government is using far more sophisticated weaponry so as to not require it to care that people can access them.

    Once this is understood fully, it then follows that the following Amendment in the Constitution of the US is actually irrelevant, as in it doesn't ever directly address the angle of encouraging the populace to be armed against the criminals within it in any specific sense (and actually not even an indirect sense):

    "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."[3]

    Alright, so when you read this do you get the impression that simply by ensuring no clinically insane person gets hold of a legal gun ensures all that much about the 'Militia' (as in every person over 18 who isn't clinically insane or has no significant criminal record among a few other factors[4][5])? It just is not enough to call the Militia well regulated simply because it's every citizen who isn't considered insane or violent based on previous official records of their behaviour. Something that I will get to later is that background checks have proven to consistently not detect 'threats' well enough by design not purely insufficient implementation and one of the prominent ways is that 'insanity' is never detectable with high functioning psychopaths among other types of insanity where masking of it is undeniably what the insane person will be good at),

    I hope that I have fully cleared up confusion about the Second Amendment and explained that it is not a violation of this Amendment because of the mechanics of it and how both 'well regulated Militia' and a scenario of a government so Tyrannical that people would need firearms would mean that the people would automatically have semi-automatic firearms banned and frankly they'd need better guns than that to fight the government and its loyal Military anyway, in order to win.

    Following on from this, we can ask ourselves what makes something worth enacting. What really is it that makes the law need to outlaw something or the people want the government to outlaw it. It's not as simple to just 'weigh the benefits of policy X against Y' as that ignores drawbacks. Additionally, weighing one vs the other totally ignores chain-reaction side effects. So what we need to admit is that there's actually no solid way to establish the 'should' beyond going form many, many angles to get a picture of if the banning of semi-automatic firearms in the US is a 'should enact' or 'do not do'.

    Let's first look at what happens when it's done. It has actually been done in nations and the results are astonishingly reassuring so long as the nation is well-developed and carries out the sting operations into the arms dealers well, as well as maintaining very good deterrents in the severity of punishment while doing many tiny things like understanding how to bait out information from people totally against becoming "rats" (AKA snitches).

    There's so much to the actual methodology but let's first observe the results so far and what they tell us. I'm going to be barely typing here. I'll paste information and quotes but I believe that to put my own words into it would only bias you towards my side and I wouldn't want to do that now, would I?

    Two quotes from the same source [6]

    "Australia has had one mass shooting since 1996.

    Meanwhile, the United States has suffered 154 mass shootings (in which four or more people were killed by a lone shooter) in just the last six months. For perspective, we are 178 days into the year, which means the US has had nearly as many mass shootings as days in 2018.

    The latest shooting — when Jarrod Ramos allegedly killed five people and "gravely injured" several others at the Capital Gazette's newsroom in Annapolis — has once again renewed a national debate around stricter gun regulation.

    We might look to other countries to see whether tighter gun laws can be successful. That is the case in Australia, where the government passed the National Firearm Agreement (NFA), a sweeping set of gun regulations, in 1996. According to the most recent data available — from 1996 to 2015 — the annual number of gun-related homicides decreased from 516 to 211.

    Before 1996, the country had seen 14 mass shootings, but one particularly horrific spree led to gun reform. In April 1996 — in the worst mass murder in Australia's history — gunman Martin Bryant killed 35 people and injured 24 others at a seaside resort in Port Arthur, Tasmania. Twelve days later, the government instituted the NFA, which includes three main provisions: tight control on semi-automatic and fully automatic weapons; a national registry of firearm owners; and a buyback program so that Australians could sell guns back to the government."


    "One of the more recent studies on the subject is by Elena Andreyeva and Benjamin Ukert, two public health researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. Their 2017 working paper suggests the NFA decreased firearm mortality by 60%, including homicides and suicides. Another one of their peer-reviewed studies , published in 2017, came to a similar conclusion.

    "The NFA is unique in that it tackles many different problems at the same time," Ukert told Business Insider.

    The newer study compares gun deaths in various Australian states before and after the NFA. It suggests the NFA was more successful in states with higher rates of firearm deaths before gun regulations were instituted.

    Andreyeva and Ukert controlled for several variables, including gender, age, economic status, and previous gun laws. Though their study accounts for both firearm homicides and suicides, they did not see a substantial decrease in total suicide rates since the NFA. The regulations may have had a much larger effect on homicides, however. The study estimates that, on average in Australian states, there has been a 96% reduction in murders by guns since the NFA.

    Other research has come to similar conclusions. A 2016 paper from the University of Sydney and Macquarie University suggests that Australian gun policies correlated strongly with declines in firearm homicides. They acknowledge that there are other factors at play (including improvements in medical technology and an overall improvement in crime), but also say the NFA was at least partly responsible for the national reduction in firearm deaths."


    The following quote is from the following source: [7]

    "1996 was a bad year in both the UK and Australia. Each of these nations had a tragic mass shooting that had qualities similar to what we recently saw in Parkland. In Dunblane, Scotland, a disturbed middle-aged man killed 18 people in a school. The victims were mostly children. He used legally purchased handguns to carry out this horrific act.

    That same year, a lone male killed 35 people in Tasmania, Australia using a semi-automatic weapon. Another senseless and unnecessary act of violence that should have been prevented.

    The people and the governments of both the UK and Australia were, as you might imagine, outraged - and they demanded change.

    Both nations swiftly implemented major changes in their gun policies, with the UK banning all handguns (except for single-shot .22 caliber pistols) and with Australia implementing major gun reform policies including a ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons. Since these changes have been implemented in these two nations, there has been a single mass shooting in a school in either of them. And it is now 22 years later. On the other hand, thousands of people in the US have died from mass shootings in this same period."


    How about a graph?[8]


    Let me get on with the debate then. What I am trying to hit home here is the following:

    Gun Bans have been carried out, they do work it's irrational to fear that a highly developed nation with a relatively non-corrupt police force will fail at implementing the bans if fully funded and encouraged in their pursuit.

    I know I have barely proved anything yet with regards to the US specifically and I'll do that in the rebuttals but overall I hope my case is clear; if the bad guys actually don't get to the guns, the good guys should not need or want them.

    Let's look a little more into this and why banning is justified.

    A common argument from Opp in debates like this will revolve around background checks. This isn't my direct rebuttal section of the debate but let it be said that I am countering this angle here and now. Background checks do not work for gun ownership in a sufficient manner even if implemented without human error. The fact of the matter is that you can only know how many times someone got so angry they beat their wife/children/whomever hard enough to warrant the official record of domestic abuse. What you can't record is the build-up to explosions (where if they had a semi-automatic firearm at hand it's not a bruised face or broken rib, it's a dead family member if not more. On top of this, you can't properly detect a high functioning (or even medium functioning) psychopath because they will be so cunning and manipulative during psychiatric exams and them aside, you have anyone with split personality disorder where you happened to analyse the tamer persona during your exam as well as the paranoid type of schizophrenics or anything similar where they are never going to open up or trust the psychiatrist and actively lie to them throughout the examination(s). I know that Opp's policy has forced psychiatric exams but since this isn't my rebuttals section (I'll address the issue with the privacy invasion and other aspects of that in my rebuttals), I still would like to point out that there's a multitude of loopholes with background checks when ti comes to people who just haven't been examined and say 'sane until proven insane' as a means to get a gun.

    For this section I, again, will just be quoting reliable sources. This will be supporting any, some or many of the things I stated just now, the sources are referenced below the relevant quote(s):

    "Data from different surveys indicate a high prevalence of domestic violence against women in all societies.{1} In western countries it is estimated that about 25% of women experience intimate partner violence over their lifetimes.2 3 However, prevalence data show only one side of the problem: the seriousness of the problem in terms of how widespread it is in our societies. Another side of the problem, one that has received less attention, is that most of the cases of domestic violence are unreported. That is, reported cases of domestic violence against women represent only a very small part of the problem when compared with prevalence data. This part of the problem is also known as the ‘‘iceberg’’ of domestic violence. An image where reported cases of domestic violence against women (usually the most severe end of violence) and homicide of women by their intimate partners represents only the tip of the iceberg. According to this metaphor, most of the cases are submerged, allegedly invisible to society."
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1732820/pdf/v058p00536.pdf [9]

    The following quote is not only relevant to domestic abuse failure in background checks in design  because of the Nightclub Shooting in Orlando, Florida (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/5/17202026/pulse-shooting-lgbtq-trump-terror-hate) but in any domestic situation where a gun could be given to someone not recorded for the abuse that builds up into a firing of the weapon

    "Statistics show that the vast majority of cases of domestic abuse involve a male abusing a female. A less widely reported statistic is the level of domestic abuse in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. The LGBT Foundation quotes a survey which estimates that 1 in 4 LGBT people experience domestic abuse. This figure puts the issue on par with that of abuse against heterosexual women.

    But as with heterosexual relationships, many cases of LGBT domestic abuse go widely unreported. One of the main reasons is because an LGBT person experiencing domestic abuse is less likely to tell a health care professional for fear of disclosing their sexual orientation.

    Unique Aspects of LGBT Domestic Abuse

    In any domestic abuse scenario the abuser will seek to gain power and control through the use of:

    • Emotional bullying
    • Physical violence and threats
    • Social isolation
    • Financial control
    • Sexual abuse

    However, in addition to these, there are also forms of abuse which are specific to the LGBT community. In those cases the abuser may also:

    • Question your sexuality by suggesting you are not a “real” lesbian or a “real” man.
    • Reinforce internalised homophobia, biphobia or transphobia by suggesting that being heterosexual is the “correct way to be”.
    • Argue that health care professionals and the authorities will not take you seriously on account of your sexual orientation.
    • Threaten to disclose your sexual orientation to your family, ex-partner, work colleagues or employer.
    • Threaten to use your sexual orientation against you in court when dealing with issues such as deciding the residence or contact with children.
    • Argue that abuse is not possible between two people of the same-sex, or brush it off as “fighting”."
    [10]


    "A new federal report drills down into the data on domestic violence, 
    reports the Times Herald-Record of Middletown, N.Y. The report, Police Response to Domestic Violence, 2006-2015, by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, says an average of about 716,000 instances of nonfatal domestic violence were reported to police each year, and about 582,000 instances went unreported. More than half of all domestic-violence victimizations – 56 percent – were reported to police, with reporting rates similar for intimate-partner violence and violence committed by other relatives.

    Police responded to 64 percent of all domestic-violence reports within 10 minutes and took a report at the scene 78 percent of the time. Charges were filed in 39 percent of reported cases, with a higher arrest rate when a complaint was signed and when there was serious injury. Among victims who didn’t report the abuse, about a third made the choice for the sake of privacy; 21 percent were protecting the perpetrator; 20 percent felt the crime was minor, and 10 percent feared reprisal, the report found. Female victims were four times as likely as male victims to forgo reporting because they feared reprisal."
    [11]


    "From 2015 to early November 2017, there were 46 mass shootings in the U.S., defined as an incident in which four or more people were shot and killed, not including the gunman. According to data collected by Everytown for Gun Safety, in 27 cases, or about 59 percent, the perpetrator killed an intimate partner or family member during the massacre or had a history of domestic violence.

    Perpetrators of mass shootings, far from being strangers to their victims, are usually husbands or boyfriends. They kill their romantic partners and family members, as well as friends, neighbors, co-workers and innocent bystanders.

    To be sure, the overwhelming majority of men who abuse their families do not go on to commit acts of mass violence. Domestic violence is prevalent in our society; mass shootings are not. But it’s worth noting the connection, as researchers have identified the key warning signs of abusers who are likely to kill in the future. They share remarkably similar traits: They have histories of strangling their partners, stalking and death threats. And, crucially, they have access to firearms."
    [12]


    "Gun violence hasn’t been in the news much anymore, as the crisis on the border with interned children continues and media turned its eye towards Trump’s visit to the UK. But a story this week brought the issue back into focus for me – mostly because of how everyday it is.

    A retired Air Force veteran shot his wife and three daughters – killing his 12-year-old daughter and wife, Charlene Orsi, who had filed for divorce just days earlier. His two other daughters – they were triplets – have survived.

    We tend to forget that in the US not only do most mass shooters have a history of domestic violence – but that the majority of mass shootings, like this one, are domestic violence murders. Women should not be the canaries in the coal mine of deadly male violence. And yet, for so long, we have been. So, as the news continues on to the next story, think about Orsi and her children, and all the others that don’t make national news."
    [13]

    "Book and her team conducted three experiments to test a theory called mimicry, “where these individuals are successful because they’re able to look normal; that would include emotional mimicry.” She says they use mimicry to avoid being detected.

    In the first experiment, students were shown video clips of violent inmates with varying degrees of psychopathy, who were told to look at a picture of a fearful face and copy that expression on their own face.

    Researchers analyzed the inmates’ expressions using the facial action coding system, which gauged how well the inmates were able to imitate fearful facial movements.

    “It turned out that people higher on psychopathy were better able to make that face,” says Book. “That was the same whether we were coding the inmate’s face for the muscle movements or whether we had other people rate those faces.

    “So, other people are seeing them as more fearful,” she says.

    In the second experiment, students watched clips of inmates describing a true story of when they did something to hurt someone else, but did not feel genuine remorse over their actions.

    The researchers instructed the inmates to tell the story as if they regretted their actions and felt bad about the situation. “Again, people higher on psychopathy were seen as more genuine,” says Book.

    In the third experiment, the researchers showed students a series of four videos, again of inmates telling false remorse stories. Inmates appearing in the videos had various ratings on scales measuring psychopathy traits and anti-social behaviour.

    Like in the other two studies, “the two videos where the inmates were high on interpersonal and personality traits related to psychopathy were rated as being more genuine,” says Book.

    “It’s difficult to spot a psychopath; in fact, they can look actually like they’re more genuine than other people,” says Book. “Part of it is that most people don’t have to fake emotions all the time, so they don’t have any practice at it. But someone who doesn’t feel these emotions will have practice at faking them, so they will probably be better at it.”

    The team’s results are reported in their study “The Mask of Sanity Revisited: Psychopathic Traits and Affective Mimicry,” published in the online journal Evolutionary Psychological Science.

    Book and her team – funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council – found that results from their experiments were consistent with the mimicry theory, first put forth by UBC researcher Daniel Jones in 2014. 

    In his 1988 book Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions, Cornell economist Robert Frank wrote that those who exploit people would have to show basic and moral emotions to be seen as being trustworthy, even if they don’t genuinely feel those emotions."
    [14]

    "Even therapists can be fooled by them.

    Psychopaths are often masters of manipulation, and by this point they have already managed to skew the whole relationship. They are very charming, and know how to tug at your heart strings, according to Neo. Unfortunately, even therapists can be fooled by them too.

    "They orchestrate this show, put on a false self in front of the therapist, and they know how to push the buttons of their partner, so their partner looks extremely unstable in these situations," she said. "The therapist may collude unknowingly with the dark triad person against the partner who really has been the one suffering."

    The psychopath may say that their partner is the "mad" one, gaslighting them into believing that it's true.

    "It's very difficult for you to realise, because they can seem so stable and so rational," Neo said.

    Psychopaths don't think there's anything wrong with them.

    It's also difficult for therapists to know how to treat narcissists and psychopaths, because the research and knowledge on the topic is fairly limited. There are several tests to help diagnose psychopathy — such as the Hare Checklist — but these are far from perfect.

    To further complicate matters, psychopathy is a wide-ranging personality disorder, and those who have it don't tend to think there is anything wrong with them. Also, their traits can mimic many other problems, such as substance abuse, domestic abuse, or a gambling addiction, making them hard to identify.

    "The psychopath or narcissist, anyone who is very abusive, they tend to be the master of smoke and mirrors," Neo said. "It could look like something else — it could be the fact he has a difficult mother, so he drinks, and after he drinks he hurts me. Or he has a drug problem. Or he has this convoluted history of paranoia, because people are unfaithful to him and hurt him. So you're always jumping from one thing to another."

    They could also be misdiagnosed as having a different personality disorder, because the therapist could pick up on something else. Depending on how cunning and manipulative the psychopath is, they may only show the therapist what they want them to see.

    "I've met quite a few who learn symptoms and pretend to have them," Neo added. "And a lot of therapies are about believing in a person's ability to change their lives. If you build a relationship with somebody, you don't want to believe they are bad. And if they have narcissistic personality disorder, or they're a psychopath, they are a bad person. So there is this inherent conflict."
    [15]

    The following two quotes are relevant to the case of the 'mandatory session' Opp suggests meeting the more sane persona during the psychiatric exam(s)

    "The following criteria must be met for an individual to be diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder:

    • The individual experiences two or more distinct identities or personality states (each with its own enduring pattern of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and self). Some cultures describe this as an experience of possession.
    • The disruption in identity involves a change in sense of self, sense of agency, and changes in behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and motor function.
    • Frequent gaps are found in memories of personal history, including people, places, and events, for both the distant and recent past. These recurrent gaps are not consistent with ordinary forgetting.
    • These symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning."
    [16]

    "Most of us have experienced mild dissociation, which is like daydreaming or getting lost in the moment while working on a project. However, dissociative identity disorder is a severe form of dissociation, a mental process which produces a lack of connection in a person's thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of identity. Dissociative identity disorder is thought to stem from a combination of factors that may include trauma experienced by the person with the disorder. The dissociative aspect is thought to be a coping mechanism -- the person literally dissociates himself from a situation or experience that's too violent, traumatic, or painful to assimilate with his conscious self."
    [17]

    There is of course far more to the flaws with background checks but I felt that I highlighted some interesting ones that are neither popular counters to the 'gun control instead of a ban' campaign and hope I've opened your mind even if I failed to convince you thus far.

    Let's round up the constructive with the explanation of the 'how' of the ban. The ban not only is feasible, it is absolutely imperative but I'm going to focus only a little bit on why it's imperative in this part and go into why it is reasonable to believe that it can be done.

    The reason that there can be issues when issuing gun bans in the US is that if you only experiment in one city or even a state, you tend to have very little 'border control' since it's not a national border. Inspections are nearly never carried out and even then are lax (I can't prove this because it's such an irrelevant thing that there's not really articles on the internet about the lack of restrictions between cities in the US or the way state borders deal with guns). I'm not saying it's easy but it's definitely 'medium' as opposed to 'hard' if we were to rank how difficult smuggling guns within the US is simply because when guns get banned, not enough is ever done to stop people interacting with the gun-allowed areas and on top of that the guns mentioned are often illegal anyway (non-registered) and no matter how good the experimental city/ies tried to make the gun ban be, the lax enforcement of gun control in the neighbouring city (or as I just explained above, futility of background checks even when carried out correctly) mean that guns end up in the hands of people in the gun-banned areas far easier than they would if it was a US-wide gun ban enforced properly across all states since smuggling cross-national-border is much easier to regulate and handle since airport scans are mandatory, so on and so forth.

    This is why we must look to examples where the entire nation banned guns to then judge if the ban works well or not.
    I'm going to be sticking to my 'paste quotes' strategy but in this part I'll be using graphs as well. Sources are below the corresponding extraction of the source.

    "From the moment 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton unloaded his legally held arsenal of handguns on children and staff at Dunblane primary school on 13 March 1996, gun control was on the cards.

    Nothing like Dunblane – a massacre of 16 five- and six-year-olds, along with the teacher who tried to protect them – had taken place before in Britain. The shock and collective grief of the whole nation resonated from the northernmost point of Scotland to the tip of Cornwall. This was not the United States, where by 1996, classroom shootings had occurred in many places including Nashville, San Diego and South Carolina.

    Gwen Mayor died with 16 of her young pupils
     Gwen Mayor died with 16 of her young pupils at the school in Dunblane, Scotland. Photograph: PNR/PA

    As grief turned to a national anger, public debate focused on how someone like Hamilton, a former Scout leader who had been ostracised because of his suspicious behaviour with young boys, had been allowed to own such lethal weapons.

    Public petitions, most notably by the Snowdrop Campaign, founded by friends of the bereaved families, called for a total ban on the private ownership and use of handguns in the UK. Signed by 750,000 people it was symbolic of the weight of public opinion.

    Nine years before Dunblane, there had been Hungerford, where Michael Ryan went on a rampage through the Berkshire town, killing 16 people in a series of random shootings before turning the gun on himself. He had been carrying a handgun and two semi automatic rifles, for which he had firearms certificates.

    The aftermath of Hungerford brought to an end the right to own semi-automatic firearms in Britain; they were banned along with pump action weapons, and registration became mandatory for shotgun owners.


    With Dunblane the focus turned to handguns – held by tens of thousands who took part in pistol shooting across the country. The Conservative then prime minister, John Major, passed the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 after the Cullen inquiry into the massacre. It banned all cartridge ammunition handguns, except 22 calibre single-shot weapons.

    But with the landslide election of Labour and Tony Blair the same year, the law was tightened further, and the remaining .22 cartridge handguns were also banned. The decision, supported by a majority of the public, all but wiped out target shooting as a sport in the UK.

    Dave Thompson, chief constable of the West Midlands, and the lead on gun crime for the National Association of Chief Constables, said: “The legislation coincided very well with a culture.”

    Overnight, however, about 200,000 owners of handguns, most of whom kept them for pistol shooting, found their weapon banned and their pastime wiped out. All small-bore pistols and rifles used by target shooters were included in the ban. Penalties for anyone in possession of an illegal firearm were tough - from heavy fines to prison terms of 10 years.

    The hostility of those involved in the sport to what they term the draconian legislation is still strong, 20 years after Dunblane. Mike Wells, secretary of the Sportsman’s Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, set up in 1996 to counter public pressure for a ban on handguns, said politicians had been driven by a need to show they were doing something but their actions did nothing to stop the criminal use of guns. “It never, never has any effect. The criminal underworld in England, the drug dealers … have all got guns, but they are illegal guns,” he said.


    Mark Mastaglio, an expert on firearms who worked for the Forensic Science Service for 20 years, said there was no evidence that the ban on handguns after Dunblane had done anything to cut the criminal use of firearms. “It was very rare that there was ever leakage from the licensed gun owners to the criminal fraternity. Most guns used by criminal are either illegally imported or converted weapons. And that remains the case today,” said Mastaglio.

    Crime statistics in the years after the ban was introduced appear to support the theory that it had little impact. Gun crime rose sharply, to peak at 24,094 offences in 2003/4. After that the number of crimes in which a firearm was involved fell consistently, to 4,779 offences in 2013. In the year ending September 2015 there was a small rise of 4% to 4,994 offences.

    Thompson said the legislation was only part of it: law enforcement agencies had to prove they would carry through on the tough penalties and there was also poor policing of gang areas, and poor ballistics records and analysis. Both were addressed in the early 2000s, when there was a huge decline in gun crime, he said.

    But there has been only one mass shooting in the UK – in Whitehaven, Cumbria, in 2010, during which Derrick Bird killed 12 people – since Dunblane.

    Mastaglio said: “Dunblane was certainly a turning point. It was a huge piece of legislation, and had a huge impact on registered gun owners in the UK. We now have one of the most stringent set of firearms legislation in the world – only Japan has tougher laws."

    Japan

    Japan has what may be the closest any country comes to “zero-tolerance” of gun ownership – a policy that experts say contribute its enviously low rates of gun crime. As of 2011, legal gun ownership stood at 271,000, according to police records, in a country of 127 million people.

    There were six reported gun deaths in Japan in 2014, according to the National Police Agency. In 2006 just two people were killed in gun attacks; when the number rose to 22 in 2007 it prompted a bout of national soul-searching.
    In his seminal 1993 paper for the Asia Pacific Law Review, whose conclusions still hold true more than 20 years later, David Kopel described Japanese gun control laws as “the most stringent in the democratic world”.

    The 1958 law on the possession of swords and firearms states: “No one shall possess a firearm or firearms or a sword or swords.” Among the few exceptions are shotguns, but here too, the restrictions would cause outrage among American gun owners.


    Before they can even lay hands on a shotgun for hunting and sport shooting, prospective owners must attend classes and pass written and practical exams. They must then undergo psychological assessments to determine they are fit to own a firearm. Police background checks are exhaustive and even extend to the gun owners’ relatives.

    The aim, according to Kopel, is to make possession of a shotgun so complex and drawn out that few people believe it worthwhile applying for one.

    Civilian ownership of handguns is banned. The few violations reported in the media usually involve members of the country’s many crime syndicates who have managed to smuggle them in from abroad.

    But Japan was not always a low-crime, gun-intolerant nation. Guns quickly became the weapon of choice for feuding warlords after Portuguese traders introduced them to the country’s south-west in the early 1500s. Over time, Japan improved the design and performance of firearms and began mass producing them.

    The beginning of the end of widespread gun ownership came when the feudal warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598) unified Japan, then disarmed the peasant population by banning civilians from owning swords and firearms in 1588.

    Seized plastic handguns
    Seized plastic handguns which were created using 3D printing technology are displayed by police in Yokohama, south of Tokyo. Photograph: Kyodo/Reuters

    “The shogunate banned them because they were fearful of the consequences of having guns in hands of an angry populace,” said Robert Whiting, author of Tokyo Underworld. The quid pro quo, Whiting added, was that the general population’s safety would be assured provided they paid their taxes.

    The notion that gun ownership should be limited to the authorities survived Japanese militarism and carried through to the postwar period. Japanese police officers did not begin carrying pistols until 1946, with the permission of the US-led occupation authorities.

    Despite sporadic outbreaks of gun violence, Japan’s yakuza crime syndicates are reluctant to build up caches of firearms. Threatening a rival with a gun is often seen as an “unmanly” departure from the yakuza’s traditional code of honour, to which even modern-day mobsters try to adhere, according to Whiting.

    Kopel says Japan’s gun laws do not necessarily prevent criminals – especially the yakuza – from acquiring guns. But, he added, even gangsters “see themselves as within the social system, in a broad sense. Even when breaking the law, they still play by certain rules of society.”
    [18]


    "Australia paid citizens to sell their guns to the government.

    (Reuters / David Gray)

    A spate of violence in the 1980s and '90s that culminated in a 1996 shooting that left 35 dead led Australian Prime Minister John Howard to convene an assembly to devise gun-control strategies.

    The group landed on a massive buyback program, costing hundreds of millions of dollars offset by a one-time tax increase, that bought and destroyed more than 600,000 automatic and semiautomatic weapons and pump-action shotguns.

    Over the next few years, gun-death totals were cut nearly in half. Firearm suicides dropped to 0.8 per 100,000 people in 2006 from 2.2 in 1995, while firearm homicides dropped to 0.15 per 100,000 people in 2006 from 0.37 in 1995.

    A US buyback would mean destroying more than 40 million guns — but at the state level, the undertaking might not be so massive.

    Japan puts citizens through a rigorous set of tests.

    Japan, which has strict laws for obtaining firearms, seldom has more than 10 shooting deaths a year in a population of 127 million people.

    If Japanese people want to own a gun, they must attend an all-day class, pass a written test, and achieve at least 95% accuracy during a shooting-range test.

    Then they have to pass a mental-health evaluation at a hospital, as well as a background check, in which the government digs into any criminal records or ties and interviews friends and family members.

    Finally, they can buy only shotguns and air rifles — no handguns — and must retake the class and the initial exam every three years.

    Unlike in the US, Japanese law has long outlawed guns. Still, the wisdom from Japan seems to be that tighter regulations keep guns confined only to those fit to use them."
    [19]

    Hunting licences, police and military have separate laws applying to them.[20][21][22] Hunters using a gun to combat an unarmed intruder in a gun-banned US should be held to high suspicion in court for overreaction as should the police and military personnel who possess a firearm at home in a gun-banned zone and who would shoot someone in what they claim is self defence. This is not (in my eyes) relevant to the debate and I want to make it clear that what I hope happens to the US (and the whole world for that matter) is a gun-free environment but since that's quite far fetched for now, I want to make it clear that the ban doesn't apply to those three categories, it's a ban for a citizen with no special license to bear arms.


    A Rant of a Rebuttal

    I am just going to give an eloquent rant as a rebuttal. I don't want to use sources here and have intertwined constructive rebuttal angles into my constructive via editing.

    Opp = The Opposition (my opponent's side)

    In my constructive I highlighted how even correctly carrying out background checks still has holes in the categories of domestic abuse and 'sanity'. What Opp seems to think is that the main issue with guns can be solved by making background checks more thorough and his/her regime even goes so far as to enforce mandatory psychiatric exams (as in you need an actual test by a psychiatrist saying 'sane') in order to get hold of a firearm. Imagine the amount of money (tax-funded of course) that's going to go into making it fair on poor people to be able to get hold of firearms. If it's not going to be state-funded then it's simply unfair and corrupt since only the rich and, at best, middle-class get armed. This money and even the people who will end up going towards the career of psychiatry as there'd be a bigger demand for the profession, are all resources (yes this include the psychiatrists who would fill in the gaps as they are human resources) that could be used far better to either fund a massive sting operation against arms-dealing-rings or fund whatever else the nation of the US may need far more.

    The issue with the entire case of Opp is really it's saying 'why ban when you can control?' but even if we ignore school-shooters, the amount of 'kill my whole family' or at least one member close to the person type "mass shootings" are all accumulated due to the availability of guns and accessibility to an instant death outlet of violence which doesn't accommodate for human time to calm down (I don't need to source this do I? We need time to calm down and it's definitely longer than the time it takes to fire a bullet).

    On top of this, There are four nations where guns have literally been nation-wide 'banned' or at least so severely controlled they are obsolete in their function in terms of civilian use: UK, Japan, Germany and Australia (I know, I didn't go into Germany in my constructive because they're the least 'all out ban' when compared to the other three but they are very close to it). These nations are well-developed nations two of whom led horrific regimes in WWII and the other two don't have the best past either (unironically Australia's bad past is largely due to UK). They realised even culturally how bad guns were and the results have been astoundingly positive when banning guns as a 'snowball' effect afterwards, no doubt about it.

    This whole 'it will happen anyway' the 'underground guns will always exist' defeatist attitude is, on a basic level, saying that we should not enact a ban on rape so long as rape will happen anyway. This is not an unfair or ridiculous analogy, this is the exact mentality that goes into the 'if it will happen anyway, we might as well allow it' argument against a ban on semi-automatic firearms. The fact is that the four nations mentioned have achieved nearly 0 underground gun-trade and even when it occurs have such strong enforcement against it due to the entire anti-gun culture they've fostered and well-funded sting operations they carried out at the start and severity in 'burst' with which they targeted one arms dealer after another that they successfully quelled this 'inevitable underground' to a degree that's negligible and the US is in no shape or form miles behind UK, Japan, Germany or Australia it's just that it's afraid to ban guns because... Oh wait, there's no actual reason...
  • Round 2 | Position: Against
    blamonkeyblamonkey 66 Pts   -  

    Sorry about the confusion as to who goes first. I was operating under the assumption that rules on this site would emulate DDO. I was unaware that I could or could not go first. Regardless, I am going to go down attacks to my case first and then refute the arguments of my opponent.

    Defending the use of a Counter Plan (CP)

    Throughout the beginning of my opponent’s case, he defines a lot of words that I neglected to define myself. I agree with the definition of a semi-automatic firearm that he showcased. However, his definition of “should” is used to rationalize the attack on the use of my CP. A multitude of arguments considering my burden in the debate occur afterwards. I offer the following responses.

    My opponent, (eh, what the heck, I’ll use prop,) argues that my position needs to be directly contradictory to the exact wording of the resolution. In other words, my position must be the reverse of what the resolution says. In fact, my advocacy is the opposite of the resolution. I am suggesting that we should not enact a semi-automatic gun ban and instead should tighten regulation that decreases gun violence at its core. I offer unique harms at the end of each of my plans that show how my plan solves while prop’s does not. For instance, my argument concerning how criminals switch weapons is a unique harm. The insolvency of prop’s position is also a unique harm that my opponent must respond to. No component of my argument even considers that prop must show how a semi-automatic weapon ban would be a panacea. Instead, I am asking prop to defend his position against mine. There is nothing unreasonable in suggesting this if prop justifies how his position decreases gun violence. What is unreasonable is prop demanding that my case follow the strict procedure of showing how a semi-automatic gun ban proves moral harms and never mention the effectiveness of gun bans because it insolvency is a lesser part of the debate. If a policy does not work in accomplishing its goals, it should obviously not be passed. This is especially the case if my plan solves for the issues that prop concedes are problematic (i.e. gun violence.) Also, prop claims that a government has a duty to protect the citizens residing in the host country. Without a solvent plan, my opponent does not fulfill his burden by proving that the law serves the people. As a side-note, there is nothing in the Debate Island rules prohibiting the use of CPs. In fact, in policy debate in the US, CPs are a common method of the negation to prove their side correct. This is done for a significant reason: policy makers are meant to do the same thing. In summation, restricting the use of my carefully constructed CP is restricting discussion of the topic outside of the usual black-or-white extremes. Also, if I cannot present CPs, then my opponent has no grounds to present an “exception” to a ban for hunting licenses as part of his introduction. He also has no grounds to assume that sting operations would occur to overturn illegal guns under his plan as well. It is also irrational for him to ‘possibly’ add caveats to his proposal as he did when he claimed that the ban might expand to the police. Therefore, hold both sides to the plans they presented before. Proposition and Opposition must be held to the plans they presented thus far without altering the original plan or CP text.

    Framework

    Prop seems to have generally accepted my framework with the caveat that the government has an obligation to protect the citizen’s safety. This is obviously correct and should be considered in the debate. I will prove that my plan solves for this, as comparative analyses would implicate my plan to save more lives, and therefore be a better plan than my opponent’s.

    2nd Amendment/ Anti-Social Personality Disorder

    I never mentioned the 2nd amendment in my argument. After this, prop posits that being angry or violent is not the only requirement that should be placed on people when considering who should or should not own a firearm. I adamantly support this idea, which is why the US had already implemented laws preventing felons and insane people from buying weapons under the definition of “adjudicated as a mental defective (1).” I offer additional qualifications to purchase a weapon, not less. Prop doubles down on this argument, asserting that it would be too difficult to diagnose people with ASPD because psychopaths can lie to hide their condition. This is not always the case. Harvard Health Publishing of the Harvard Medical School offers guidelines that include patient history and even differences in the patient’s frontal lobe that would differentiate from that of a psychologically healthy human (2). Furthermore, the National institute of Mental Health’s published statistics showing that nearly 10% of adults in the US have some type of personality disorder, and ASPD represents roughly 1% of the US population (3). The US population on the 4th of July in 2018 was 328,054,892 according to the US Census (4). 1% of this number is over 3 million people who would be prevented from purchasing a weapon because they are diagnosed with ASPD, (which is better known as Anti-Social Personality Disorder.) My plan restricts many from getting weapons to commit crimes. It also requires not just psychopaths from receiving weapons, but people who demonstrate severe anger issues as well.

    “…additional restrictions to purchasing a weapon include diagnoses of personality disorders, or any type of diagnoses that describes the patient as aggressive, violent etc.

    Australia

    It is quite interesting that prop brings up Australia as an example of how gun bans caused gun crime to plummet. The NFA that prop has epitomized as a system to follow encompasses more than a simple semi-automatic gun ban. Eugene Kiely summarizes what the law also did, namely, it implemented a mandatory buyback program in which citizens gave up 1/5 of guns in private hands, or roughly 700,000 guns. It also implemented strict laws on licensure and registering firearms. Future scrutinizing of gun laws also occurred after the passage of the law as well (5). This is not what prop is necessarily advocating for. Even if his plan was a precise replica of the Australia law, it would be insufficient reason to reason that the same success can be emulated within the US. For one thing, the full extent of the arms market in the US, whether legal or illegal, is comparatively massive. USA Today reports in 2017 that the US owns 42% of the world’s 650 million civilian firearms (6). To force compliance of people paranoid of the government’s intervention would be impossible. Because my opponent doesn’t stick to a specific advocacy and switches between Australia, Japan, and England, his entire case is not substantially justified. Also, the University of Sydney and Macquarie University study concluded the following:

    “Following enactment of gun law reforms in Australia in 1996, there were no mass firearm killings through May 2016. There was a more rapid decline in firearm deaths between 1997 and 2013 compared with before 1997 but also a decline in total nonfirearm suicide and homicide deaths of a greater magnitude. Because of this, it is not possible to determine whether the change in firearm deaths can be attributed to the gun law reforms. (7)”

    In other words, causality is not necessarily determined as other types of suicide also declined as well, proving that violent crime committed against others and oneself was on a downward trend even before the ban occurred. Samantha Bricknell writes for the Australian Government’s Institute of Criminology and showcases the nuanced grey areas that my opponent misses via a visual aid.

    httpsaicgovausitesdefaultfilespublicationstandiimages359-figure_01png (8)

    The observed homicide rate, while on the general decline since 1989 (before the ban was implemented,) also saw a spike in homicides in the 2000’s even after the ban was put in place.

    Moreover, the peer-reviewed study you provide from the University of Pennsylvania contains the same issue that the Sydney University study contained as well. This was the conclusion drawn from the study:

    “Current evidence showing decreases in firearm mortality after the 1996 Australian national firearm law relies on an empirical model that may have limited ability to identify the true effects of the law.”

    Yes, gun homicides are now miniscule, but parsing the effect of the ban itself on certain weapons from other aspects of the law and then if this model would work perfectly in the US is illogical.

    Death by gun in the US

    I am not going to ascertain that gun death is a minor problem in the US. In fact, I agree with prop that gun violence must be mitigated. This is not to say that a gun ban is a better solution than my plan. In fact, the entire point of my CP was to prove an alternative that could eliminate more gun crime than my opponent.

    Background Checks

    My opponent asserts, once again, that people with ASPD can hide their disability. It is possible to hide symptoms of this disorder but diagnoses still occur and will still be able to be picked up by psychologists. The National Institute of Mental Health interviewed people suffering from personality disorders and found that in total, 39% of those diagnosed reported seeking mental health treatment within the past 12 months (3). Thus, it is obvious that these people would be denied a firearm under my plan. However, contrary to prop’s interpretation, my plan extends far beyond disallowing people diagnosed with ASPD to purchase firearms. As I have already stated beforehand in my 1AC

    “Additional restrictions to purchasing a weapon include diagnoses of personality disorders, or any type of diagnoses that describes the patient as aggressive, violent etc.”

    This plan includes restrictions on all diagnosed people who exhibit signs of aggressive behavior. This also includes Intermittent Explosive Disorder, which is defined by the Mayo Clinic as the following:

    “repeated, sudden episodes of impulsive, aggressive, violent behavior or angry verbal outbursts in which you react grossly out of proportion to the situation. Road rage, domestic abuse, throwing or breaking objects, or other temper tantrums may be signs of intermittent explosive disorder (13).”

    By testing for these types of psychological illnesses, we limit the probability of domestic abuse even further.

    In other words, anyone who wants to purchase a weapon must be psychologically evaluated within three years of buying a weapon. If their actions are considered “red flags” by psychologists, then they would not be able to buy a gun under the plan I propose.

    Domestic Violence

    The current system we have prohibits those who have committed domestic violence in the past from purchasing firearms (10). The increase in police presence and the psychological examinations I provide in my plan solve for this better than the gun ban that my opponent proposes.

    First, consider that my opponent has advocated for an increase in sting operations undertaken by law enforcement. He has left out any potential increase in funding to the police and instead asked that sting operations that attempt to seize illegal weapons become a priority for police agencies. The cities that suffer from the much violence may not have adequate funding to enforce the demands of prop. I have already given examples from 3 cities in my first post (Trenton, Lansing, and Buffalo.) However, there are way more instances of police layoffs throughout the US in dangerous US cities. Lynchburg, Ohio laid off their entire police force, for example (11). Expenditures by police agencies take up a lot of the budget of certain, crime-infested cities. Forbes reports that Orlando, Minneapolis, Detroit, Houston, and Chicago already spend over 30% of the cities’ general fund expenditure (12). Do you really think that cities are willing to allow the police to sponge up the entirety of their budget while other programs fall by the wayside? Under prop’s plan, cities are forced to hire more manpower to take on these sting operations when not a decade ago, collective shortfalls were massive because state and local budgets did not earn as much. My plan fixes this through more police hiring, adequately responding to domestic violence claims and arresting those who hurt others.

    Through psychological examinations, we prevent many people from legally purchasing a weapon who would abuse their spouse by determining whether the potential gun buyer has anger issues. As I have already mentioned, Intermittent Explosive Disorder would also be treated under my plan as a disqualifying trait when considering who gets a gun and who doesn’t. The number of people who would not be able to buy a gun under my plan is vast. The NIH determined that roughly 7.3% of adults in the US suffer from IED, and would thus not be able to purchase weapons, attacking domestic abuse at its core (14).

    What does my opponent do to stop domestic abusers from getting guns? Not much is done whatsoever. No part of prop’s plan involves confiscating every single weapon through anything besides sting operations which would tax already limited resources. Given the magnitude of the civilian weapon ownership, it would be impossible to eliminate all possibility of a gun being privately owned even if we dedicated every police officer in every city to confiscating weapons via sting operations. Once again, consider how many weapons are owned, (42% of the world’s civilian owned guns per the previously mentioned USA Today article. (6)) There is no reason to believe that under either plan in today’s debate that all the arms in the hands of the people can be eliminated in one fell swoop. However, my plan bolsters police presence and security, and requires investigative bodies to do their job in cracking down on gun violence while also investigating straw-gun purchases and corrupt dealers that divert too many weapons to the black market.  This plan does not require sting operations into every single home of people who own weapons, and it does not require increased activity without adequate funding. Confiscation of every single semi-automatic gun in the US would be costly to states and police agencies as demonstrate by California’s attempt to curb illegal ownership of weapons. According to Reason Magazine, the California legislature took thousands of guns off the street with their already expensive program, and then had to pay $24 million to expedite the process when they realized that nearly 12,000 Californians still owned weapons illegally. The program ran out of funds before the California legislature decided to pay an additional $24 million to decrease illegal gun ownership (15). This was with the aid of a My plan is nowhere near as onerous on police and state budgets and can be proven to decrease gun violence through common-sense reform.

    Feasibility cont.

    My opponent attempts to clear up why his plan is a viable solution to gun violence by showing that borders between states and cities are permeable. He claims there to be way too little evidence on the internet. I beg to differ:

    “A 2014 report from the city of Chicago noted that 60 percent of guns used to commit crimes in Chicago from 2009 to 2013 originated outside of Illinois, and Indiana and Wisconsin were two of the biggest sources of recovered guns. And Illinois is not alone (16).”

    It took my 5 seconds to find this. Regardless, my plan works on the federal level too, and proposed policies would affect the entire nation which includes Wisconsin and Indiana. Straw gun purchases will be heavily disincentivized, dealers will be prosecuted, and enforcement will not be determined by your state under my plan. My plan is even more likely to reduce gun crime by attacking both legal and illegal pathways to receiving a gun through increasing the amount of people who would not be able to buy a weapon and attacking illegal sales to prevent guns from being diverted to the black market. My opponent seems to have conceded that the illegal arms market is expanded under his plan, but he doesn’t solve for this through anything besides more sting operations. I fund police officers and strengthen laws that target those who divert weapons to the black market to begin with.

    England, England, England… that’s the country for me!

    The problem with citing multiple instances of gun bans that may have reduced crime is determining that the gun ban itself was the determining factor in decreasing gun homicides. In other words, you need to prove causality. However, the gun ban may have influenced gun murder rates less than one would think. Mint Press News observes the data available and found a minor increase in violence in the early 2000s after the ban was implemented which was followed by a decrease in violence later, after a surge of police presence occurred (17).

    Also, the ban proposed by the UK goes far beyond the prop’s plan. Britain’s plan was to eliminate more than just semi-automatic weapons, it also tried to eliminate the usage of/severely limit the usage of automatic weapons, guns disguised as ordinary objects (i.e. walking sticks,) and even target pistols. This is not prop’s plan.

    Japan

    Japan’s gun ban is once again, this is not my opponent’s plan. Japanese laws go farther than a simple ban on semi-automatic weapons. Japanese gun control is characterized by strict licensing of firearms, and a miniscule population when compared to the US. It involves, as my opponent’s own sources point out:

    a.       Testing to determine eligibility to own a firearm

    b.       A mental health evaluation

    c.       Must retake the exam every three years

    d.       Are only allowed to own air rifles and shotguns

    This is not what my opponent wants to do. Prop needs to specifically show why the gun ban, and none of the additional requirements that were imposed on the people.

    Also remember the differences in the number of weapons in the US and in Japan. There is a stark contrast in implementing a US ban and a ban on any other country due to our large gun-owning population.

    Extend the following arguments that have yet to be addressed:

    Semi-automatic weapons are switched out for other types of weapons. Even if “semi-automatic weapon” is a broad term, the evidence from Kopel I provided show that criminals switch guns to those that are not regulated.

    There will be a spur in black market weapons. Whether a “defeatist attitude” exists, it is ridiculous to consider a spur in black market weapons to be something that we shouldn’t consider. Also, my opponent compares legalizing rape to legalizing the purchase of semi-automatic guns. Legal weapon transactions are in no way equal to rape. Moreover, I still statistically prove, and my opponent concedes to the increase in black market weapons.

    Other rebuttals

    Prop states that it would be unfair to poor people to buy a weapon because they would have to foot the bill of the psychological evaluation. He neglects to mention that most guns under his plan would put poor people at an even greater disadvantage because a great deal of weapons would be banned, leaving automatic rifles the only guns that poor people can buy. Even if this is unfair, I still limit gun deaths under my plan through the psychological evaluations. Then, he states that the money used would be better in a massive sting operation or anything else the US needs. This is not as much a plan as it is simply suggesting that the funds could be better spent. Maybe this is the case. However, without a specific advocacy, and a dearth of evidence in the effectiveness of massive sting operations, as well as the lack of specificity on determining whether the US or the states should oversee this massive, police budget destroying plan, it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. He also concedes that my plan would increase jobs in psychiatry. That means more people in noteworthy positions of treating mental illness and forces price-competition for good psychiatrists. This is a benefit for my CP. Also, consider the use of sting operations. Sting operations are the following according to US Legal which provides the legal definition of a sting operation:

    “Sting operation is a deceptive operation designed to nab criminals. Generally, a law-enforcement officer or cooperative member of the public play a role as criminal partner or potential victim and go along with a suspect's actions to gather evidence of the suspect’s wrongdoing (18).”

    This can be effective, but it is not a surefire way to catch criminals in the act. The FBI’s attempt to wiretap and utilize a sting operation to catch the Orlando shooter failed after 10 months of surveillance according to NPR (19). Given the lack of a gun registration, in the US, we may not even be able to determine who owns a weapon and who doesn’t.

    Also, even though I never mentioned the NICS background check system, it is not the destructive and horrible policy that prop assumes it is. An Office of Inspector General Audit found general effectiveness as the FBI processed more than 51 million records and did not accept half a million-gun transaction request (20). Giffords Law Center furthers this argument, showing that from the Virginia Tech Shooting to the year 2014, mental health records in the National Instant Criminal Background check system increased by 700% (21).

    He does not address the specific parts of my case that attack straw-gun purchases that decrease gun crime substantially by cutting back on the illegal weapon market. I will remind the judges of the following from the Giffords Law Center:

    “An ATF study of 1,530 gun trafficking cases determined that straw purchasers were involved in almost one-half (46%) of the investigations, and were associated with nearly 26,000 illegally trafficked firearms.

    Subsequent ATF investigations at gun shows also uncovered “widespread” straw purchasing from gun dealers, where guns were diverted to “convicted felons and local and international gangs.”

    Moreover, when city officials from NY in 2009 conducted investigation at a gun show looking for dealers who would feel comfortable to sell a gun to a straw purchaser, 94% were found to be willing to do so (22).

    This is likely part of the reason that legal weapons find their way into the hands of criminals and on the black market. The ATF study from 2000 also reported that 1% of federally licensed firearm dealers accounted for over 60% of the guns that are found at crime scenes.” – From my original case

    Also, my BJS study shows the extent of the illegal gun market:

    “In fact, a BJS report from 2001 found that almost 80% of criminals surveyed reported receiving their most recent firearm from an illegal source or a friend/ family member (23).”

    Conclusion

    My opponent’s plan relies too heavily on the unsubstantiated and unspecified gun ban that was mentioned up till now. He relies on plans of other countries’ but does not show that the gun ban specifically decreases crime. All the while, my plan decreases illegal gun markets from growing and restricting legal purchase of weapons. He also has not directly attacked components of my case such as the mandatory minimum on straw gun purchases that decrease crime and increase enforcement.

    Negate, and good luck to my talented opponent.

  • Round 2 | Position: For
    someone234someone234 647 Pts   -   edited July 2018

    The optimal way to go about guns in a nation (which is exactly what Japan does and the fact they have severe gun control doesn’t prove me wrong about ‘banning’) is to take guns from everyone as a default (yes even the military and police) theoretically and then only giving the minimum severity of weapon necessary for the person to need in order to keep society (in this debate’s case that of the US) as safe as possible. What Japan does is force you to get investigated much further than the current gun control method of USA and even further than the plan that Opp is offering. Japan interviews your entire family, colleagues and investigates deep into your past associations, even indirect one, among many other things. In fact let’s see just how far they go to ever allow you to be considered for a gun let alone give you one:


    “Japan has one of the lowest rates of gun crime in the world. In 2014 there were just six gun deaths, compared to 33,599 in the US. What is the secret?

    If you want to buy a gun in Japan you need patience and determination. You have to attend an all-day class, take a written exam and pass a shooting-range test with a mark of at least 95%.

    There are also mental health and drugs tests. Your criminal record is checked and police look for links to extremist groups. Then they check your relatives too - and even your work colleagues. And as well as having the power to deny gun licences, police also have sweeping powers to search and seize weapons.

    That's not all. Handguns are banned outright. Only shotguns and air rifles are allowed.

    The law restricts the number of gun shops. In most of Japan's 40 or so prefectures there can be no more than three, and you can only buy fresh cartridges by returning the spent cartridges you bought on your last visit.

    Police must be notified where the gun and the ammunition are stored - and they must be stored separately under lock and key. Police will also inspect guns once a year. And after three years your licence runs out, at which point you have to attend the course and pass the tests again.

    This helps explain why mass shootings in Japan are extremely rare. When mass killings occur, the killer most often wields a knife.”
    https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38365729

    Would Opp support the additional tax funding and complicated procedure involved to test all those Americans who want guns with these steps on top of their suggested controls? I doubt they could justify that and they’d also be running a different plan than they did ifn Round One by doing so.

    The case Opp is making is interestingly one that agrees with me that guns are bad and definitely agrees that the aim is not gun rights for all or that as many people as possible accessing guns ensures good people can fight back. Instead, Opp fervently supports quite significant (and as much as it feasible, severe) gun control but denies that the ultimate ‘Utopian outcome’ as in the aim of making gun control more thorough and strict is to eventually amount to a situation where all law abiding citizens don’t need guns as nearly all criminals don’t have them. Americans tend to believe strongly in the need for guns and I am quite sure the reason why the US hasn’t yet outlawed guns, not enough would vote for a party that wanted to fully take the guns from its people. The issue is that just because it’s very complicated to justify and prove it can be done doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be enacted if people were properly educated on the matter and on the success in anti-gun nations.

    The fact is that I agree with Opp on something; if there’s an overnight ban, only criminals will be left with guns due to how poorly the US authorities are preventing unregistered guns existing let alone getting into the wrong hands.

    I agree, entirely, with Opp that an overnight ban is never a good solution but disagree with Opp that this isn’t the end goal. The only reason why gun control is better than a ban is because gun ban takes time. It takes many sting operations, long time spreading news to make the populace hate guns instead of think they need them and an understanding that the end goal should undeniably be a nation with no guns, not a nation where law abiding citizens demand guns because the police are too inadequate to stop the criminals getting hold of them.

    This debate is about what the US should do, not what is the easiest solution or the simplest one to get the American population to agree with (and yes, Debate Island seems to be majority American and in the comments I do so far notice a bias towards Opp which I hope isn’t going to carry over into voting but if it is, so be it I accept my defeat). Just so you guys understand, it is not true what was said in the comments about statistics not including unsolved cases in UK not being included in the stats but being included for USA. This is simply untrue and the one commenting this is confused (or intentionally misleading).This is a debate about what’s most imperative, what’s the ultimate end goal for the US government to enact regarding guns in order to keep its populace as safe and happy as possible and the answer is in the end a ban but in the immediate probably a progressive set of stages towards a ban.

    I don’t have exact data about the cost of the sting operations and I am aware that Trump has been reducing funding to the police [https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/12/17004432/trump-budget-police-cops-hiring-2019] but since I’m being called out on my lack of numbers, let’s start to go into that.

    To begin with this idea that ‘semi-automatic guns are switched out for other weapons’ is quite a narrow-minded response in all senses of the term. Obviously more knife-based attacks will be occuring and muggings will be much more common with knives and perhaps knuckle dusters rather than guns but that’s a given and since they are less lethal overall, in fact let’s just stick to statistics instead of saying ‘obviously knives are better than guns’ because what’s interesting is that it appears since US culture is overall more weapon-happy than UK (they prefer to give many people weapons to ‘fight back’ instead of taking weapons from all as the end goal) the result regarding alternative-to-gun crimes when compared with UK is quite interesting indeed and is not what Opp suggests.

    There’s actually one article so ‘pure gold’ with regards to proving this that I am going to quote the entire thing start to end:

    http://www.euronews.com/2018/05/05/trump-s-knife-crime-claim-how-do-the-us-and-uk-compare-

    “Donald Trump has sought to defend the use of guns in the US by drawing a parallel with knife crime in London.

     

    The US president, addressing the National Rifle Association, claimed a London hospital had become overwhelmed with victims of knife attacks.

    "They don't have guns. They have knives and instead there's blood all over the floors of this hospital," he said. "They say it's as bad as a military war zone hospital. Knives, knives, knives, knives.”

    So, how does the US and the United Kingdom compare when it comes to gun and knife crime?

    We looked at murder rates from both weapons over a five-year period.

    There were 34 firearm homicides in the US per million of population in 2016, compared with 0.48 shooting-related murders in the UK. 

    Knife murders are also higher stateside: there were 4.96 homicides “due to knives or cutting instruments” in the US for every million of population in 2016.

    In Britain there were 3.26 homicides involving a sharp instrument per million people in the year from April 2016 to March 2017.

    London suffered a spike in knife crime in the early part of this year, and the total number of murders during February and March exceeded that in New York.

    Last month, trauma surgeon Martin Griffiths told the BBC that some of his colleagues had likened the Royal London Hospital in east London where he works to the former British military base Camp Bastion in Afghanistan.

    "Some of my military colleagues have described their practice here as being similar to being at Bastion," he said. "About a quarter of what we see in our practice is knife and gun injury. And it's now we're doing major life-saving cases on a daily basis."

    But on Saturday he implied Trump had drawn the wrong conclusion from his remarks, saying on Twitter that he would be happy to invite Trump to his "prestigious" hospital to discuss London's efforts to reduce violence.

     

    "There is more we can all do to combat this violence, but to suggest guns are part of the solution is ridiculous,” said Professor Karim Brohi, trauma surgeon at the Royal London Hospital. “Gunshot wounds are at least twice as lethal as knife injuries and more difficult to repair."

    Trump's NRA speech also drew anger in France on Saturday, after the US president, using his hand in a gun gesture, acted out how a gunman had killed hostages one by one during an attack in Paris in November 2015.

    Trump said a civilian could have stopped the massacre at the Bataclan concert hall, where 90 of the 130 victims of the attack died, had they had a gun.

    Former French president Francois Hollande, who was head of state at the time, said on Twitter that Trump's comments and antics were "shameful" and "obscene".

    Donald Trump's shameful and obscene remarks says a lot about what he thinks about France and its values. The friendship between our two people will not be tainted by disrespect and excessiveness. All my thoughts to the victims of November 13.“

     

    The fact is, the issue with the US is that it feels it’s better to arm everyone than to disarm the criminals as a fundamental idea. This is objectively unsafe/dangerous. Even though Opp concedes to me that permeability of State-borders and city boundaries has led to the trial runs of gun removal being skewed (I think them for Googling it) what I have found is fairly irrefutable evidence that, the less bullets allowed in an area the less people die per mass shooting… So what if that amount was 0? What then? Let’s first understand some raw statistics. In Round 1, I already gave four nations where it’s been done to the relative fullest extent with either ‘airtight gun control’ or a gun ban all-out. The ‘airtight gun control’ is still not ideal in my eyes and the end goal should always be a nation where guns are not floating around or needed in order for everyone to be relatively safe and happy.

    If we concede that smaller magazines being allowed is always going to reduce the impact of enraged shooters (or plain and simple sadistic ones and whatever others kind of shooters there are) and we also concede that the less that can be fired within a given amount of time, the safer the nation (the reason automatic weapons are worse than semi-automatic is that the need to pull the trigger again and again to fire is a significant factor in reducing the overall lethality and severity of mass shootings as well) then we can begin to approach the idea that if there’s 0 bullets floating around and 0 triggers to poll we are at the safest outcome so long as it’s actually 0 as far as is viable and that the police are not just allowing some inevitable ‘black market boom’ as Opp seems to present as not only inevitable but significant in size and a gloom-and-doom counter to the gun ban regime.

    Just before I continue, let’s make clear what I said just now is true, I will put the sources below the extractions:


    An analysis performed for CNN found that states that have enacted magazine restrictions are associated with fewer mass shooting events.

    "Whether a state has a large capacity ammunition magazine ban is the single best predictor of the mass shooting rate in that state, " said Michael Siegel, a community health science professor at Boston University, who conducted the analysis. These states are associated with a 63% lower rate of mass shootings, according to his analysis.

    These bans, which are present in eight states, reduce the maximum total number of rounds that can be shot before reloading to 10 or 15. One state, Hawaii, only restricts the magazine size of handguns. The analysis was completed over the other seven states: California, Connecticut, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York between 2012 and 2016.

    Siegel's analysis only found a correlation, and is not a causal explanation. He looked at many possible socio-demographic factors and gun laws that could be associated with mass shootings, controlling for population and gun prevalence. Magazine laws were far and away the strongest. The states that have banned large-capacity magazines still struggle with enforcement, and the effects of their policies are largely unknown.

    Siegel's analysis, which is not published but was performed for CNN, is based on the same methodology as past peer-reviewed research he published. The data is from Stanford's Mass Shooting database, which looks at events with three or more victims (not necessarily fatalities), not including the shooter. Other databases have different definitions for what qualifies as a mass shooting.

    A separate study released Monday in the Journal of Urban Health found high-capacity magazines have been used in over 40% of the murders of police in recent years, according to a new, comprehensive report on crimes involving semi-automatic weapons. The report was co-authored by the lead investigator of the congressionally-mandated assessment of the 1994 federal assault weapons ban.

    High-capacity magazines, such as those found in the Las Vegas shooter's hotel room, raise the number of bullets that a firearm can shoot before reloading. The increase can vary, but is often from 10 bullets to 30. In the case of the Nevada shooting, the firearms used in the shooting had magazines that could carry upwards of 100 bullets. The Las Vegas shooter appears to have modified at least one of his semi-automatic weapons to operate more like an automatic weapon. Bump fire stocks, such as the one the Las Vegas shooter apparently used, simulate automatic fire, but don't actually alter the firearm and so are legal under current federal law.

    The study did not specifically examine such bump fire stocks, but rather weapons using large-capacity magazines, which have increased as weapons used in crime.

    "High-capacity semi-automatics have grown from 33% to 112% as a share of crime guns since the expiration of the federal ban -- a trend that has coincided with recent growth in shootings nationwide," the authors write.

    These weapons also tend to be used in the deadliest shootings. William Johnson, one of the report's co-authors and a doctoral student at George Mason University, told CNN that one of the report's biggest takeaways is that that as crimes get more severe, the type of weapons involved tend to be capable of killing more people.

    "As firearms are used in more lethal situations -- when they're using against law enforcement or used in mass shootings -- they're more likely to have a large-capacity magazine or to be an assault weapon," he said.

    https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/05/politics/gun-laws-magazines-las-vegas/index.html

     

     

    Whenever a mass shooting shocks America, people ask if tighter gun-control measures could have prevented the slaughter.

    Gun violence researchers say that no law can eliminate the risk of mass shootings, which are unpredictable and represent a small minority of gun homicides over all. But there are a handful of policies that could reduce the likelihood of such events, or reduce the number of people killed when such shootings do occur. And several of them have strong public support.

    These are findings from surveys we conducted a year ago about the recurring problem of gun violence in the United States. We asked dozens of researchers in criminology, law and public health to assess a range of policies often proposed to prevent gun deaths. We also conducted a national poll to measure public support for the same set of measures.

    The policies in the upper right corner of our matrix are those that were deemed effective and popular. The most effective one, according to our experts, would be restricting gun sales to anyone found guilty of a violent crime. Under federal law, such limitations apply to those convicted of felonies or domestic violence crimes. That idea has not been debated much among federal policy makers.

    Expanding background checks for gun purchasers to a wider range of gun sales was also judged effective and popular. It is an idea that was considered by Congress in 2013, but failed to win enough votes to become law. Some popular measures, like strengthening sentences for illegal gun possession, were deemed less effective. And some measures that experts thought could reduce deaths, such as banning all semiautomatic weapons, were less popular, though a majority of people in our survey still approved.

    In general, the public was more accepting of measures limiting the types of people who could obtain weapons than of restrictions on the types of guns and accessories available on the market.

    The attack at a Las Vegas concert on Sunday was unusual even among mass shootings. Stephen Paddock, the shooter, appeared to have used modified semiautomatic weapons that fired at the rapid pace of a machine gun. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California has proposed legislation that would prohibit so-called bump stocks, the devices found on several of his guns. At least some Republicans in Congress have expressed openness to the idea.

    We did not ask specifically about “bump stocks,” but we did ask about a broader set of gun modification restrictions that were part of a 1990s law known as the assault weapons ban, and about outlawing large-capacity ammunition magazines that enable rapid fire. Our experts thought both ideas could reduce the death toll from mass shootings, but they were not among the most popular ideas with the public.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/05/upshot/how-to-reduce-mass-shooting-deaths-experts-say-these-gun-laws-could-help.html

     

    We can dilly-dally with this ‘more control’ ‘better control’ ‘super control’ utopia but eventually it’s all conceding that the end goal (the policy end-game) which the strengthening of controls is working towards is a situation not where all “sane” people have guns but where they don’t need them or want them and the proof that it works is in nations where it has been done to the maximum of what could be done and it ended up working so well. Japan does have a gun ban and you need a special license to get a gun, this is not the same concept as a society where the default is to be allowed a gun unless proven insane, criminal-prone or violent.

    I don’t have exact amount of money needed for the sting operations because they are always top secret among many other reasons but it’s definitely doable. It begins with the media helping inform people of just what a problem guns are and that the solution is to enable the police to intervene hard and fast. Then, it involves cultural change to hate guns instead of want them in response to what happens when they are around. The issue in America is there is not enough hatred of guns, the hatred is being given to the government’s left-wing for daring to suggest that less people should get access to them and which would ask more tax (yes I admit that) to fund the sting operations and to investigate any and all leads regarding the gun trade. It’s not enough to say ‘there’ll be a black market’ because to stop that is the exact same thing; better police and sting operations.

    “The stings were associated with an abrupt 46.4% reduction in the flow of new guns to criminals in Chicago (95% confidence interval, −58.6% to −30.5%), and with a gradual reduction in new crime guns recovered in Detroit. There was no significant change associated with the stings in Gary, and no change in comparison cities that was coincident with the stings in Chicago and Detroit.”
    (same source as the quote below)

    “The announcement of police stings and lawsuits against suspect gun dealers appeared to have reduced the supply of new guns to criminals in Chicago significantly, and may have contributed to beneficial effects in Detroit. Given the important role that gun stores play in supplying guns to criminals in the US, further efforts of this type are warranted and should be evaluated.”
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2586780/

    Let’s just be crystal clear, the only reason why semi-automatic ban is not seeming realistic is because voters don’t like it due to a culture that likes guns as a solution to gun crime. The US needs to be better informed is all. If things actually got properly debated and considered it’s far more likely that this would be realistic on top of ideal.

    “In a march on the Florida statehouse in Tallahassee following the Parkland shootings, students who had survived called for a new assault weapons ban, starting with a ban in the Florida legislature.

    But a proposal last week in Florida to debate a ban on semi-automatic weapons never even made it to the floor of the legislature.

    On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, a Democrat in the House introduced a ban on military-style assault weapons and others, but with Republicans in the majority that bill seemed a non-starter.

    Beckett, our correspondent, has noted the suggestion of experts that it may be more effective to focus simply on limiting ammunition capacity rather than on banning military-style weapons.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/27/gun-control-proposals-florida-school-shooting

    The reason why experts are conceding to ban ammunition to as small magazines as possible instead of guns is purely because it’s clear the Americans by and large are biased against policies that ban guns as they fear it not working so much.

    I don’t understand what’s so magical or unique to UK, Japan, Australia and Germany and even countries where it’s much closer to a gun ban than the ‘everyone who is sane enough and over 18 should get a gun’ mentality of the US. It’s not just ideal, it’s doable and I don’t have exact numbers ouside of the study provided but what I do have is nations where the exact set of sting operations and cultural informing of the harm of guns and solution of removing guns being supported by the media led to a very positive outcome (and where even knife-murder is far less frequent than the US). The issue is a culture of weapons-allowance combined with leaders who would rather reduce funding to the Police to then lower tax and please voters than do what’s best for the American people and help inform them (Trump).


  • Round 3 | Position: Against
    blamonkeyblamonkey 66 Pts   -  

    As this debate ends I would like to thank prop for sticking with the debate through till the end. With that out of the way, on to the rebuttals and voting issues.

    I would ask that there be no more constructive arguments past this point. Otherwise, my opponent offers points that I could not possibly refute.

    Japan & His Plan

    The literal first paragraph of my opponent’s case is a complete backtrack from his previous round. Instead of focusing on the original plan that was proposed, prop tries to sell us on Japanese gun control. I have a few responses.

    This was not your original plan that you proposed. My R2 argument had one section that was underlined and italicized that specifically asked both sides not to differ from the original plans given in our initial posts. The reason that this statement was included involved an understanding of the harmful act of “moving the goal posts.” An advocacy outlined by prop being altered because he realized a flaw with his original plan of attack is inherently abusive because every time I prove prop wrong, he could advocate for something else in an exhaustive, never-ending cycle. By doing this, one skews debate and creates a situation that demands more proof from one side to disprove a different claim after I proved the previous one to be insufficient. Also, your original plan never called for a ban of guns from the military. In fact, you conceded:

    Hunting licences, police and military have separate laws applying to them.[20][21][22] Hunters using a gun to combat an unarmed intruder in a gun-banned US should be held to high suspicion in court for overreaction as should the police and military personnel who possess a firearm at home in a gun-banned zone and who would shoot someone in what they claim is self defence. This is not (in my eyes) relevant to the debate and I want to make it clear that what I hope happens to the US (and the whole world for that matter) is a gun-free environment but since that's quite far fetched for now, I want to make it clear that the ban doesn't apply to those three categories, it's a ban for a citizen with no special license to bear arms.”

    So even if your claim that the Japanese system would work in the US and would be a better system than my plan is correct, (which I will prove wrong in a second,) you do not get to claim that that is your advocacy. Your advocacy had nothing to do with investigations into past associates. In fact, Japan allows police to carry firearms while on duty (1).

    Let me explain literally what happened to my opponent’s claims and case. If my opponent meant to ban guns from police and the military as part of his plan, then it would contradict his original plan as well as the new advocacy that he stands for, which is a gun ban akin to Japanese law. If my opponent did not change his advocacy from the original plan of banning guns and using sting operations while allowing people with special licenses to buy guns, then regardless of whether it is better than my plan or not makes no difference because Japanese gun policy or a ban on military and police weapons does not fall under his advocacy. Essentially, my opponents plan is acting like I would at a buffet table: indecisively. Because I cannot post any more arguments to refute the next position that my opponent takes, consider any new advocacy from here on out to be irrelevant, as it does not pertain to the effectiveness of gun bans themselves or the sting operations he prescribed in his first post.

    Even if you do not buy the analysis of why calling “backsies” on an advocacy is abusive, then consider the practicality of his argument. I have already much of this before, but cross-apply my evidence of how many guns are in the hands of private citizens in the US, (that being over 40% of all firearms in civilian possession in the world,) and one can easily see how unviable this idea is (2). Also consider the massive cost to cities and states as budget deficits widen and police agencies are forced to close operations. Remember, under the Japanese plan, weapons would be confiscated, all-day classes would have to be created etc. If my opponent would still want the sting operations, which is likely, police budgets would either balloon, taking up entire cities’ budgets, or not exist. Prop even concedes that police agencies are facing increasing budget cuts from the executive office and provides a source (3). It is obvious that his plan would not work. In fact, I quantified the cost to one state to confiscate weapons to those who, after purchasing a weapon, were disqualified from purchasing additional weapons due to current mandates that prevent some mentally ill people and criminals from purchasing guns. My statistic shows that California repeatedly ran out of funds to attack the issue and had to increase funding by $24 million to enact the plan. The most interesting part is that the goal of increasing the funds by $24 million was to decrease the amount of those owning weapons down from 12,000 people owning weapons down to 8,300 by the year after the funds were implemented (4).

    Tax hike for my plan

    I would not agree that the tax hike would be a problem if it were to lead to safer streets. However, prop makes an interesting point by saying that the tax hike was not part of my advocacy. You would be correct. I am asking that funds be devoted to the programs that I advocate for, and I am allowing the federal government to determine how the funds are generated. Given the large, inefficient budget that we currently have, it is not too much to ask that allocation of funds from another area occur.

    Plan part dos

    Once again, the advocacy my opponent stands for has changed. He now wants to add propaganda to strengthen the idea that guns are bad so that the populace hates guns. To set up essentially the anti-NRA, it would need to be included in my opponent’s first post. I also do not see how this is going to help with crime. Overall, I am left confused as to why this is even mentioned. Next, he discusses the possibility of having a nation without guns, not just semi-automatic firearms, but all guns. This is in no way prop’s plan. I hope that this was just a slip of the finger.

    Knife Crime

    I claimed that banning semi-automatic weapons would make it harder to get a gun legally, and thus people will turn toward other types of guns. If my opponent’s goal is to make a gun-free Utopia, then I do not know how this could happen if only semi-automatic weapons are banned. I provided evidence from Kopel that proved that the last time a ban occurred in the US on a national level, there was a switching of weapons. Here is what the study found:

    “Although criminal use of Aws (assault weapon) has declined since the ban, this reduction was offset through at least the late 1990s by steady or rising use of other guns equipped with LCMs (large capacity magazines). As argued previously, the LCM ban has greater potential for reducing gun deaths and injuries than does the AW ban. Guns with LCMs – of which AWs are only a subset – were used in up to 25% of gun crimes before the ban, whereas AWs were used in no more than 8% (5).”

    “Nationally, semiautomatic handguns grew from 28% of handgun production in 1973 to 80% in 1993 (Zawitz, 1995, p. 3). Most of this growth occurred from the late 1980s onward, during which time the gun industry also increased marketing and production of semiautomatics with LCMs (Wintemute, 1996). Likewise, semiautomatics grew as a percentage of crime guns (Koper, 1995; 1997), implying an increase in the average firing rate and ammunition capacity of guns used in crime (5).”

    The exponential increase in semi-automatic handgun purchases and LCMs indicate that people caught wind of the ban and changed the way they bought guns. Whether prop finds this fact ridiculous does not change the fact that it exists. I personally find that the existence of a Purge TV show is completely bonkers, deluding myself by suggesting that it does not exist is not a logical choice. Instead it, much like dowsing myself in copious amounts of coffee and diet cola, happens to be one of my many coping mechanisms.

    I happen to not support the president’s ideas or sentiment. Nevertheless, as demonstrated by prop, the UK has draconian laws that prohibit owning many weapons outright. A semi-automatic gun ban is not identical. Instead of switching to knives, it would be easier and more efficient for murderers to purchase automatic guns.

    Permeable state and local boundaries

    You are welcome for giving you the evidence. I agree that there are lots of problems with lack of action on the state level. What I will not concede is that my plan is insufficient in dealing with the problem. The harms that prop points to have nothing to do with a lack of a gun ban in neighboring states. Instead, it is the lack of strict gun control. I provide this strict gun control with my plan by increasing the requirements to buy guns, cracking down on unscrupulous dealers, stopping straw-gun purchasers, increasing police enforcement with funding, and stopping stolen guns from ending up in crime scenes near corpses. This is national policy that would restrict the flow of illegal weapons to the black market, increasing their cost due to limited supply, and stopping more people from getting a weapon.

    My opponent’s plan offers no funding and only relies on sting operations to eliminate the threat of guns in the US. While my opponent finally offered evidence showing credence to sting operations working, he never shows why this cannot happen under my plan as well as described in my round 1 argument.

    “Increase spending on police agencies. This can be accomplished through a $4 billion in categorical grants to each state specifically to increased personnel and training. Investigative bodies that frequently check licensed dealers and gun shows must be maintained.”

    “Frequent inspection by ATF members will occur in suspected dealers that allow straw-gun purchasing”

    This was ripped right from my round one case. Your evidence points toward sting operations against gun dealers, not owners.

    “To assess the effects of undercover police stings and lawsuits against gun dealers suspected of facilitating illegal gun sales in three US cities (Chicago, Detroit, Gary) on the flow of new firearms to criminals (7).”

    The funds I give to the ATF would work to decrease unscrupulous dealers though this method or whatever the police find fitting. However, without more officers and funds available, it would be hard to keep up with ever-increasing operations to remove lots of guns from lots of people. Also, sting operations have a problematic externality that needs to be addressed as pointed out by Mother Jones. The “War on Terror” brought about many unfortunate situations for Muslims in the US, and sting operations added fuel to that fire.

    “Sting operations resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants. Of that total, 49 defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur—an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.”

    “In many sting cases, key encounters between the informant and the target were not recorded—making it hard for defendants claiming entrapment to prove their case (6).”

    I don’t think I need to further explain why encouraging the behavior that you are punishing is bad. It is equivalent to a police officer arresting you for drug dealing after injecting you with heroin. Entrapment and encouraging the very behavior you are penalizing is pure, unadulterated absurdity.

    My opponent asks me and the judges to consider the benefits of zero guns and zero bullets. I agree that that world sounds appealing. Unfortunately, that is as unlikely as a sudden deluge of pickles throughout the entire world at the same time, (or the likeliness of White Flame losing a debate, trust me I did the math, we are both totally screwed come next round.) Maybe I am a “doom and gloom” pessimist as my psychiatrist, family, friend, and now you surmised due to my insistence on gun control and not prohibition. However, I reckon myself a realist as well. I believe that an actual change in gun crime is not going to come about because of a Brobdingnagian gun law, but with common-sense reform.

    Magazines

    I never made the argument that we shouldn’t restrict magazines. Your plan at the beginning did not mention it either.

    Next, prop brings up a graph. This graph shows how many Americans support a gun policy and how effective it is. I do not see the relevance. The consensus among experts is riveting, but you never cited an American expert showing how a semi-automatic gun ban will be effective here and how it could be enforced. I am also curious of how many studies or experts it could have excluded, whether small sample sizes were taken into effect, or if the studies take into account exactly what your plan suggests up till now which also includes mass sting operations, increased propaganda, and whether the number of lives saved by a semiautomatic weapon would eclipse the savings of a multitude of policies that I prescribed.

    Tax cont.

    My opponent concedes that a tax hike would be necessary to pay for his plan. As he clearly forgot, he criticized me in advance if I were to advocate for a tax hike because it was not a part of my CP. He never includes the idea of increasing taxes in his original plan. So, which is it, are you going to say that my lack of funding mechanism is bad because I do not include a tax, or is it ok for me to suddenly determine that I can add a tax to my case?

    Police

    My opponent has said the following:

    “It’s not enough to say ‘there’ll be a black market’ because to stop that is the exact same thing; better police and sting operations.”

    My plan solves for this with funding and investigations through other avenues besides sting operations into corrupt dealers. Your plan does not. Also, if police have their guns taken away, how are they going to defend against well-armed gun owners or dealers?

    Extend unaddressed arguments

    Stolen firearms being reported would decrease crime.

    The Australian model is not guaranteed to reduce gun violence according to my opponent’s own studies.

    The Japanese gun law model and UK model are not my opponent’s plan.

    English gun laws were followed by a brief increase in crime before falling to lows, after police officers were recruited.

    Voting Issue #1: Gun Crime

    I presented 4 policies enacted federally in my CP that would target the illegal and legal markets. Weigh this against an underfunded, broken police force scrambling to conduct sting operations while trying to wrestle guns from millions of Americans. Considering that my opponent keeps switching plans from one country to another and then adding in things like bans for the military and police, one should consider his advocacy nebulous. He never refutes my arguments about how my policies decrease gun crime.

    Voting Issue #2: Different Models

    None of the models presented on their own are simply semi-automatic weapon bans. Instead, they contain multiple policies, deal with a different number of guns, and cannot be directly compared to the US situation. Also, prop does not stick with one advocacy.

    Voting Issue #3: Sting Operations

    Without an adequately funded police force and with no funds, how can this be accomplished? My plan offers both and allows for sting operations which prop shows to be successful.

    Vote Con!

     

     Sources

    1. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/03/20/reference/police-who-stand-with-big-sticks/#.W1vGSdJKjIU
    2. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/10/03/americans-really-like-their-guns-they-own-42-650-million-civilian-firearms-worldwide/726321001/
    3. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/12/17004432/trump-budget-police-cops-hiring-2019
    4. https://reason.com/blog/2016/03/17/confiscating-guns-more-costly-and-diffic
    5. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/204431.pdf
    6. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/fbi-terrorist-informants/
    7. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2586780/

     

     

     

     



     


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