Position Interaction Constitutionality

Resistance to oppressive social structures is an innate emotion of humans

The Liberty/oppression foundation, I propose, evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of living in small groups with individuals who would, if given the chance, dominate, bully, and constrain others. The original triggers therefore include signs of attempted domination. Anything that suggests the aggressive, controlling behavior of an alpha male (or female) can trigger this form of righteous anger, which is sometimes called reactance. (That’s the feeling you get when an authority tells you you can’t do something, and you feel yourself wanting to do it even more strongly.35) But people don’t suffer oppression in private; the rise of a would-be dominator triggers a motivation to unite as equals with other oppressed individuals to resist, restrain, and in extreme cases kill the oppressor. Individuals who failed to detect signs of domination and respond to them with righteous and group-unifying anger faced the prospect of reduced access to food, mates, and all the other things that make individuals (and their genes) successful in the Darwinian sense.36 The Liberty foundation obviously operates in tension with the Authority foundation. We all recognize some kinds of authority as legitimate in some contexts, but we are also wary of those who claim to be leaders unless they have first earned our trust. We’re vigilant for signs that they’ve crossed over a line into self-aggrandizement and tyranny.37 The Liberty foundation supports the moral matrix of revolutionaries and “freedom fighters” everywhere. The American Declaration of Independence is a long enumeration of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of absolute Tyranny over these states.” The document begins with the claim that “all men are created equal” and ends with a stirring pledge of unity: “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” The French revolutionaries, similarly, had to call for fraternité and egalité if they were going to entice commoners to join them in their regicidal quest for liberté.

Anti-Blackness

Gun violence disproportionately impact black communities – you focus on the wrong issue

DeFilippis and Hughes 15 Evan Defilippis (graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a triple degree in Economics, Political Science, and Psychology. He was the University of Oklahoma's valedictorian in 2012, he is one of the nation's few Harry S. Truman Scholars based on his commitment to public service, and is a David L. Boren Critical Languages scholar, fluent in Swahili, and dedicated to a career in African development. He worked on multiple poverty-reduction projects in Nairobi, Kenya, doing big data analysis for Innovations for Poverty Action. He will be attending Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School in the Fall.) and Devin Hughes (senior at the University of Oklahoma with degrees in Finance and Risk Management. He is a National Merit Scholar and Oklahoma Chess Champion, with numerous academic publications) “How America’s Lax Gun Laws Help Criminals and Cripple Minority Communities” Vice July 6 2015 http://www.vice.com/read/how-americas-lax-gun-laws-help-mass-murderers-and-cripple-minority-communities-706 JW

And as federal prosecutors decide whether to file hate-crime charges against the shooter— 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof, whose manifesto lays out his plans to start a "race war"—some gun-rights advocates have argued that new gun control laws would disproportionately hurt black Americans and other minorities, claiming that similar laws have disproportionately targeted these communities and contributed to the already-massive racial disparities in the US prison system. But these arguments also tend to ignore the devastating consequences that weak gun laws have had for minority communities. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, black Americans are twice as likely as whites to be victims of gun homicide. According to a report from the Center for American Progress, in 2010, 65 percent of gun murder victims between the ages of 15 and 24 were black, despite making up just 13 percent of the population. Gun homicide is also the leading cause of death for black teens in the US, a group that also suffers gun injuries 10 times more frequently than their white counterparts. The numbers may help explain why an overwhelming majority of black Americans—75 percent according to a 2013 Washington Post/ABC News poll—support stronger gun control laws. Yet even in areas where local governments have enacted gun control measures, lax regulations elsewhere have sustained a robust network of unregulated private transactions that allow gun dealers to look the other way while supplying gangs and other criminals with a vast assortment of weapons. This network leaves a place like Chicago, which remains crippled by violence despite relatively strict gun laws, hard-pressed to keep weapons off the street—as this New York Times map illustrates, anybody in the city who wants a gun need only take a short drive outside Cook County to get to a jurisdiction with much weaker regulations. A similar situation has arisen in Maryland, which despite having some of the country's most stringent gun laws, has been plagued by violent crime in urban areas. Amid finger-pointing over the rioting that ravaged Baltimore earlier this year, it's worth pointing out that the majority of crime guns are trafficked in from outside the state. So while the gun policies Maryland has implemented—including a policy requiring individuals to pass a background check and obtain a permit prior to buying a firearm—have been shown to reliably reduce gun violence, neighboring states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia have much looser requirements, making it easy for weapons to flow across the border. RELATED: Gun Control Will Not Save America from Racism This haphazard patchworks of state and local gun laws has enabled many private gun dealers to effectively exploit gang violence and crime to boost sales. Chuck's Gun Shop, for example, which operates just outside Chicago, is responsible for selling at least 1,300 crime guns since 2008, and one study found that 20 percent of all guns used in Chicago crimes recovered within a year of purchase came from the store, because existing gun laws allow the store to sell firearms to criminals who would undoubtedly fail a background check if it were required. The same is true for Realco, a Maryland gun shop on the outskirts of Washington, DC: Between 1992 and 2009, law enforcement agents from Maryland and DC traced 2,500 crime guns back to Realco, four times more than were traced to second most prolific crime-gun dealer in Maryland. The disastrous effects of these policies has overwhelmingly been borne by minority communities. In Chicago, for example, 76 percent of murder victims between 1991 and 2011 were black, 19 percent were Hispanic, and just 4 percent were white. The cause of these deaths was overwhelmingly gun violence. Across the country, the evidence suggests that weak gun laws not only play into the hands of mass murderers looking for the easiest way to commit atrocity, but also exacerbate the tragic, everyday violence that disproportionately cripples minority communities. The solution is not to pretend, as has become fashionable among gun advocates, that gun violence is simply the unavoidable cost our of constitutional freedoms, but to instead support commonsense policies of the sort implemented in nearly every other industrialized nation.

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