I affirm the resolution: Resolved: In the United States, private ownership of

handguns ought to be banned.

The only entity capable of banning private ownership of handguns. Thus,
both sides of the debate ought to consider what the governments obligation
is.
The first and foremost obligation of a government is to protect its people.
Professor Kennan from Princeton writes: Kennan, George F. [Prof. Emeritus at the Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton University], Morality and Foreign Affairs (p. 206). Council on Foreign Relations, 1985
Second, let us recognize that the functions, commitments and moral obligations of governments is not the same as those of the

. Government is an agent, not a principal. Its primary obligation is

to the interests of the national society it represents, not to the moral
impulses that individual elements of that society may experience. No more
individual

than the attorney vis a-vis the client, can government attempt to insert itself into the consciences of those whose interests it

The interests of the national society for which

government has to concern itself are basically those of its military
security, the integrity of its political life and the well being of its people.
These needs have no moral quality. They arise from the very existence of the national state in question
and from the status of national sovereignty it enjoys. They are unavoidable necessities of a
national existence and therefore not subject to classification as either
good or bad. They may be attached questioned from a detached philosophic point of view. But the government of
represents." Let me explain.

the sovereign state cannot make such judgments. When it accepts the responsibilities of governing, implicit in that acceptance is the
assumption that it is right that the state should be sovereign, that the integrity of its political life should be assured, that its people
should enjoy the blessings of military security, material prosperity and a reasonable opportunity for, as the Declaration of

For these assumptions the government needs

no moral justification, nor need it accept any moral reproach for acting
on the basis of them.
Independence put it, the pursuit of happiness.

Thus, the side that saves the most lives should win this debate.

Contention 1: Having a gun around the house increases the risk of accident.
Hugh LaFollette, [Professor in Ethics, University of South Florida], Gun Control,
Ethics Vol. 110, 2000.
Third, having

a gun around the house (or on the person) even for self-protection
increases the chance that someone in the family will kill themselves with the gun or
will be the victim of a homicide or an accident. One study found that for every time a gun in the
implies that for every
home was involved in a self-protection homicide, they noted 1.3 unintentional deaths, 4.5 criminal homicides, and 37 firearm suicides.
case where someone in a gun-owning household uses a gun to successfully stop a lifethreatening attack, nearly forty-three people in similar households will die from a
gunshot. Taken together the evidence does not prove that widespread availability of guns increases the number of homicides.
This

However, that empirical evidence, bolstered by earlier armchair arguments, makes the claim highly plausible.

This means regardless of crime rates, guns increase the rate of deaths in households with

guns. Banning private ownership of guns decreases the chance of accidents.

Contention 2 is Crime.
A. Most crimes are from handguns.
FBI 2014 https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.2014/cius-home
Nearly 68 percent (67.9) of the homicides for which the FBI received weapons data
in 2014 involved the use of firearms. Handguns comprised 68.5 percent of the
firearms used in murder and nonnegligent manslaughter incidents in 2014. (Based on
Expanded Homicide Data Table 8) Among the robberies for which the UCR Program received weapon information in 2014, strongarm tactics were used in 43.0 percent, firearms [were] in 40.3 percent, and knives or cutting instruments in 7.9 percent. Other
dangerous weapons were used in 8.8 percent of robberies in 2014. (Based on Table 19) Of the aggravated assault offenses in 2014 for
which law enforcement provided expanded data, 26.9 percent were committed with personal weapons, such as hands, fists, or feet.
Firearms were used in 22.5 percent of aggravated assaults, and knives or cutting instruments were used in 18.8 percent. Other weapons
were used in 31.9 percent of aggravated assaults. (Based on Table 19)

B. the most recent evidence shows gun rights increase crime

Aneja et al 14 Abhay Aneja (Stanford University; University of Califor-nia, Berkeley - Haas School of Business), John J. Donohue III (Stanford
Law School; NationalBureau of Economic Research), Alexandria Zhang (Johns Hopkins University). The Impactof Right to Carry Laws and the NRC
Report: The Latest Lessons for the Empirical Evaluationof Law and Policy. Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper No. 461. 1 December
2014. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2547018_code22598.pdf ?abstractid=2443681&mirid=2

Across the basic seven Index I crime categories, the strongest evidence of a statistically significant effect would be for aggravated
assault, with 11 of 28 estimates suggesting that RTC laws increase this crime at the .10 confidence level. An omitted variable bias test
on our preferred Table 8a results suggests that our estimated 8 percent increase in aggravated assaults from RTC laws may understate
the true harmful impact of RTC laws on aggravated assault, which may explain why this finding is only significant at the .10 level in
many of our models. Our

analysis of the year-by- year impact of [right to carry or] RTC

laws also suggests that RTC laws increase aggravated assaults. Our analysis of
admittedly imperfect gun aggravated assaults provides suggestive evidence that RTC laws may be
associated with large increases in this crime, perhaps increasing such gun assaults
by almost 33 percent. In addition to aggravated assault, the most plausible state
models conducted over the entire 1979-2010 period provide evidence that RTC laws
increase rape and robbery (but usually only at the .10 level). In contrast, for the period from 1999-2010 (which seeks to
remove the confounding influence of the crack cocaine epidemic), the preferred state model (for those who accept the
Wolfers proposition that one should not control for state trends) yields statistically significant evidence for only one crime suggesting
that RTC laws increase the rate of murder at the .05 significance level. It will be worth exploring whether other
methodological approaches and/or additional years of data will confirm the results of this panel-data analysis and clarify some of the
highly sensitive results and anomalies (such as the occasional estimates that RTC laws lead to higher rates of property crime) that have
plagued this inquiry for over a decade.

Prefer Anejas study because unlike Neg studies it study accounts for:
31 years of evidence
The Cocaine epidemic between 1999 and 2010
And State trends

Contention 3 is Suicides
Handguns uniquely fuel suicide rates.
Harvard School of Public Health reports
Ecologic studies that compare states with high gun ownership levels to those with low gun ownership levels find that in the U.S., where there are
more guns, there are more suicides. The higher suicide rates result from higher firearm suicides; the non-firearm suicide rate is about equal across states.

For example, one study (Miller 2007) used

survey-based measures of state household firearm

ownership (from the CDCs Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System) while controlling for state-level
measures of mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, and other factors associated
with suicide. The study found that males and females and people of all age groups were at higher risk for suicide if they lived
in a state with high firearm prevalence. This is perhaps most concrete when looking not at rates or regression results but at raw
numbers. The authors compared the 40 million people who live in the states with the lowest firearm prevalence (HI, MA, RI, NJ, CT,
NY) to about the same number living in the states with the highest firearm prevalence (WY, SD, AK, WV, MT, AR, MS, ID, ND, AL,
KY, WI, LA, TN, UT). Overall

suicides were almost twice as high in the high-gun states,

even though non-firearm suicides were about equal.
Guns are more lethal than other suicide means. Theyre quick. And theyre
irreversible.
About 85% of attempts with a firearm are fatal: thats a much higher case fatality
rate than for nearly every other method. Many of the most widely used suicide attempt
methods have case fatality rates below 5%. (See Case Fatality Ratio by Method of Self-Harm.)
Attempters who take pills or inhale car exhaust or use razors have some time to reconsider mid-attempt and summon help or be
rescued. The method itself often fails, even in the absence of a rescue. Even many of those who use hanging can stop mid-attempt as
about half of hanging suicides are partial-suspension (meaning the person can release the pressure if they change their mind)
(Bennewith 2005).With

a firearm, once the trigger is pulled, theres no turning back.

Contention 4 is Intimate partner Violence

A. Handguns perpetuate a culture of intimate partner violence
Sorenson Firearm Use in Intimate Partner Violence: A Brief Overview Susan B.
Sorenson 2006
Despite a general emphasis on danger posed by strangers, intimate partners with guns present the greatest fatal risk to women.

Women are more than twice as likely to be shot by their male intimates as they are
to be shot, stabbed, strangled, bludgeoned, or killed in any other way by a stranger (Kellermann and Mercy 1992).
A handgun is the weapon of choice. In addition, as shown in Figure 4, the most recent data
available indicate that as homicides of women by strangers have decreased, the
number of homicides by intimates with hand-guns has increased.
Fatalities are not the only way in which firearms and other weapons are used in intimate partner violence. This observation is
important because most intimate partner violence is ongoing, nonfatal abuse. Fewer than one quarter of 1% of intimate partner assaults
are fatal. Nonetheless, when there has been a history of violence against the woman by her male intimate, regardless

of
other demographic characteristics of the victim or the assailant, characteristics of their relationship, forms of prior abuse,
and a host of other variables, his access to a gun is a potent predictor of a fatal assault (Campbell et al.
2003).
Recent research indicates that the gender discrepancy in firearm use among intimates holds for nonfatal as well as fatal violence.
National hospital discharge data document that men are 8 times more likely than are women to be treated for a gunshot wound (Gotsch
et al. 2001) but that women are 3.6 times more likely than are men to be shot by a current or former spouse than by a stranger (Wiebe
2003). In

a national survey of the general population, women were more likely than
were men to have a gun used against them by an intimate partner: threatened with a gun (3.5% for
2000). Whereas the base rates are low, these
women vs. 0.4% for men) and gun used against them (0.7% for women vs. 0.1% for men
percentages translate to unsettling numbers: 16 in every 1,000 U.S. women have
been threatened with a gun, and 7 in 1,000 have had a gun used against them by an
intimate partner.
; Tjaden and Thoennes

B. firearms are commonly used to inflict terror and coerce women.

Sorenson 2

Firearms are used in ways that do not result in firearm-related injuries. A gun can be used to coerce behaviors
such as sex, as a means to inflict terror, and so on. Firearms, particularly handguns, may be more
common in homes where battering has occurred than in the general population. In a
statewide survey of residents of battered womens shelters, more than one third (36.7%) of the sheltered women reported that there was a firearm in the
home (Sorenson and Wiebe 2004). Only about one sixth (16.7%) of women in the general California population report that there is a firearm in the home

In two thirds of the battered womens households that

contained a firearm, the intimate partner used the gun(s) against the woman,
usually threatening to shoot/kill her (71.4%) or to shoot at her (5.1%). In other words, when
(Center for Health Policy and Research 2001).

there was a gun in the home where battering had occurred, it commonly was used against the woman.

Through accident, suicide, crime, and domestic violence prevention, banning handguns
will simply save lives. Thus, I urge an affirmative ballot.