Yonah Vang

AFF
The 42nd U.S. President, Bill Clinton, once said, "When personal freedom
is being abused, you have to move to limit it." Private handgun ownership paves
the path towards a nation with an obstruction to safety. Although there are many
regulations and requirements that citizens must meet to privately own handguns,
it does not necessarily mean that there will be increased chances of safety.
It is because I agree with Bill Clinton, that I AFFIRM the resolution:
Resolved: In the United States, private ownership of handguns ought to be
banned.
Definitions:
private ownership: owned by a private individual or organization, rather than by
the state or a public body (Collins English Dictionary)
handgun: a small gun designed to be held and shot with one hand (Merriam
Webster)
ought: moral obligation (Merriam Webster)
ban: to prohibit the use, performance, or distribution of (Merriam Webster)
Today I value safety defined as the state of not being dangerous or
harmful. Safety is the most important value for this resolution because handguns
are extremely dangerous and can lead to deaths whether it was intended or
unintended by those who own them. It is in the interests of the people to be safe
and free from harm or danger, but when handguns are put in any situation, it
only leads to an opportunity of disaster. In order to uphold my value, I offer my
value criterion of upholding Locke's veil of ignorance. When deciding
whether or not we should ban private ownership of handguns, we must first
create a certain mindset to make the most moral decision. We must pretend as if
we are all citizens who do not know their society they will be put in and that we
can not make decisions based on our own personal differences. Having this
mindset is what leads to making the most morally justified decision because it
allows for the citizens to determine what would be best for any society they would
become a part of.
Contention 1: Private handgun ownership makes suicide attempts
readily available
Unsafe in Any Hands The

Violence Policy Center is a national non-profit educational foundation that

conducts research on violence in America and works to develop violence-reduction policies and proposals.
http://www.vpc.org/studies/unsafe.htm

2000.

the largest number of gun

deaths is,suicides, not homicides, has been consistently overlooked. For example, from
1990 to 1997 there were 147,000 suicides committed with a
firearm in contrast to 100,000 firearm homicides. An estimated
90,000 of these suicides were accomplished with a handguna
tribute to the operational simplicity and high lethality that
make it the ideal suicide machine. Perhaps because of a lingering sense of suicide as a shameful
Throughout the long and bitter debate over gun violence, the fact that

act, this calamitous by-product of handgun ownership has been largely disregarded by even gun control advocates. Obviously handguns by

their ready availability has increased their

use in suicide attempts and the use of a firearm all but
guarantees that a suicide attempt will end in a fatality.
themselves do not make people suicidal. But

We can see here that although most handgun owning

advocates argue that they need handguns in order to defend
themselves in hostile situations, the presence of handguns
themselves lead to unintended outcomes and only provides
another opportunity for potential deaths.
Contention 2: Australia proves gun control lowered

firearm death rates

Lopez, German [Staff writer for Vox covering the criminal justice system]. "America's
Gun Problem, Explained." Vox. Vox Media, 02 Dec. 2015. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.
<http://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-states-america>.

In 1996, a 28--year--old man walked into a cafe in Port Arthur,

Australia, ate lunch, pulled a semi-- automatic rifle out of his bag,
and opened fire on the crowd, killing 35 people and wounding
23 more. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia's history. Australian lawmakers responded with new legislation that, among
other provisions, banned certain types of firearms, such as automatic and semi--automatic rifles and shotguns. The
Australian government confiscated 650,000 of these guns through a
gun buyback program, in which it purchased firearms from gun owners. It established a
registry of all guns owned in the country and required a permit
for all new firearm purchases. (This is much further than bills typically proposed in the US, which almost
never make a serious attempt to immediately reduce the number of guns in the country.) The result: Australia's
firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the
seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate
fell by 57 percent, according to one review of the evidence by
Harvard researchers.
We can see here that Australia's homicide and suicide rates
dropped significantly the moment they changed their policy of

private gun ownership. If America were to do the same, it

could also lead to a decrease in our own homicide and suicide
rates leading to a higher state of safety for the citizens.
Contention 3: Handguns promote a culture of violence
Subpoint A: The acceptance of handgun violence has led to harms
toward children

Phyllis F.

Agran

(gastroenterologist)

1987

Public Health Reports Injuries to Children: The Relationship of Child Development

to Prevention Strategies (1974-) Vol. 102, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 1987), pp. 609-610

The
young child is introduced to the handgun as a toy; violence with handguns is
a mainstay of television drama. Moreover, there are an estimated 50 million guns
in America, including tens of millions kept in households in which there are
children. The young child does not understand the danger of the real
Injuries to children from firearms is largely a problem of the proliferation of handguns and the acceptance of handgun violence in our culture.

object or the difference between it and a toy gun. While "playing" with the family gun, one child
As for the adolescent who has grown up in our "gun culture,"
the handgun is all too often seen as the quick solution to conflict, and there
has been increased incidence of handgun suicide and homicide among
adolescents, ages 15-24
somehow kills another child.

When children are born into a society that accepts handgun violence as a
way to solve solutions, it leads to reckless decision making based on impulse
and rather than rational thinking.

Subpoint B: Gun ownership proves to be associated with a culture of gun

violence
Edward L.

Glaeser and Spencer Glendon 1998

Who Owns Guns? Criminals, Victims, and the Culture of Violence The

American Economic Review, Vol. 88, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Hundred and Tenth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May,
1998), pp. 458-462

gun ownership is
higher for individuals whose peers own guns. This strategic complementarity occurs
because in a fight the benefit of having a gun rises if your opponent has a gun and because the likelihood of being
punished for using or having a gun declines if everyone is a gun user .
We have four tests of the view that guns are a symptom of a "culture of private justice." First, we predict that

Second, gun ownership should decline with police availability and confidence in the legal system. Third, following Nisbett and Cohen (1996), we expect to find a
connection between a general tendency toward violent retribution and gun ownership. Fourth, since handguns provide a less visible signal, we expect to see that

individuals who
answer yes to the question "Would you approve of hitting someone
who hit your child?" are more likely to own guns. Gun ownership
appears to be associated with a general taste for violent retribution. The
next row shows that gun ownership is negatively correlated with confidence in
the three effects just described are stronger for guns generally than for handguns The next row in the table shows that

the Supreme Court. Gun ownership is also negatively correlated with the number of police per square mile in the state, holding overall
population density constant. In the fourth row from the bottom , we see that gun-owners are less likely to
believe that public officials care about them, suggesting that private
and public justice appear to be substitutes.
We can see here that the private ownership of handguns simply ends
conflicts with dangerous violence. In order to be more progressive
and safe, we must ban handgun ownership and actually solve these
conflicts so that these conflicts do not appear again.
Contention 4: The cost and benefit analysis shows that banning guns
is rational

The Violence Policy Center

Unsafe in Any Hands

foundation that conducts research on violence in America and works to develop
violence-reduction policies and proposals.
http://www.vpc.org/studies/unsafe.htm

is a national non-profit educational

2000.

a handgun is a consumer
product that ought to be judged and regulated by the same
standards applied to all other products. However, the firearms
industry is exempt from basic federal consumer product health and
safety regulation. Aside from the issuance of pro forma licenses for gun manufacturers and dealers, no federal agency
The mythology woven around the handgun by the gun lobby clouds the reality that

has the authority to review the firearm industry's products in terms of their relative costs and benefits.Using this cost/benefit standard, two
reasonable and essential questions need to be posed about the handgun Is it innately dangerous to the user or to anyone else? What does

by making a simple
comparison between the costs of civilian handgun ownership
versus the benefits these weapons are purported to deliver, the case
for banning handguns becomes self-evident. For example, for every
time in 1997 that a civilian used a handgun to kill in selfdefense, 43 people lost their lives in handgun homicides alone.
This passes any point of rational justification for condoning the
existence of such a product on the open market, especially in
an unregulated state.
its use cost society in human and monetary terms in contrast to its beneficial applications? Indeed,

We can clearly see here that the certain bad from the ownership of
handguns do not outweigh the possible good. With gun ownership,
someone's safety will always be obstructed and there will not always
be a guarantee of justice being served.