Resolved: In the United States, private ownership of handguns ought to be banned

Degrazia

Washington D.C. ruling only applies to states.

While the Heller decision was unquestionably a legal milestone, it was technically limited to federal enclaves such as Washington, DC. The Court’s reasoning was extended in McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010).15 Chicago, like the nation’s capital, had banned private handgun ownership. The McDonald decision explicitly stated that the right to own guns applied to the states—and, of course, to jurisdictions within them.

MSL 15

Racist policing is non-unique—gun control is still good. This evidence is an indict of Gourevitch and does the weighing.

This fellow really needs to get out more. He needs to observe the manner in which poor people of any race are treated in the criminal justice system. Once he recognizes that poor whites also are abused, he may notice that even middle class folks admit responsibility for crimes they did not commit, in order to avoid serious punishment and going deeply into debt. Usually, only the rich can afford private legal counsel, without which one has little recourse but to plead guilty "just to avoid the possibility of more severe punishments." Criminal gun laws often merit severe punishment if they're violated. The life of an innocent person may depend on it. "Racial justice." Alex Gurevitch summarizes, "is a precondition for any reasonable gun control regime." No, it is not. Currently, we have neither, with one an important goal and the other an important means to an end, reduction in crime. We also are nowhere near either. Most of those individuals abusing the Second Amendment are young men and, except in mass shootings, often black. With their motives hardly benign and lifestyles short of exemplary, encouraging them to possess lethal weapons without legitimate cause is unlikely to spur white Americans to embrace that cause of racial justice Gourevitch emphasizes

McAllister 16

Studies prove-gun control doesn’t solve suicide- people find other means.

McAllister 16 D.C. McAllister (journalist based in Charlotte, NC. She graduated from the UNC Chapel Hill School of Journalism and has worked in both print and television news as an associate producer for the morning show at WFTV Orlando, a correspondent for the Orlando/Lake Sentinel and United Press International out of the Miami bureau, and a reporter at the Aiken Standard in South Carolina. Her work has appeared at Real Clear Politics, Hot Air, InstaPundit, and Ricochet, and she has been a guest on BBC Radio, One America News Network, Newsmax TV, KNRS) “No, Goldie Taylor, Gun Control Won’t Reduce Suicide” The Federalist January 12 2016 http://thefederalist.com/2016/01/12/no-goldie-taylor-gun-control-wont-reduce-suicide/ JW

But Guns Don’t Cause Suicide This is a point made in a National Academies’ Firearms and Violence report, which thoroughly examines studies such as those Taylor cites in light of direct causality. From all the evidence gathered, the committee came to the following conclusions: States, regions, and countries with higher rates of household gun ownership have higher rates of gun suicide. There is also cross-sectional, ecological association between gun ownership and overall risk of suicide, but this association is more modest than the association between gun ownership and gun suicide; it is less consistently observed across time, place, and persons; and the causal relation remains unclear. The risk of suicide is highest immediately after the purchase of a handgun, suggesting that some firearms are specifically purchased for the purpose of committing suicide. Some gun control policies may reduce the number of gun suicides, but they have not yet been shown to reduce the overall risk of suicide in any population. An important point the report makes—and one Taylor glosses over—is that even if you remove guns from a home, a person who wants to commit suicide will still find other means. As previously mentioned, women mostly kill themselves with poison. Removing guns will do nothing to help most women who struggle with depression that leads to suicide. And while it is true that guns are more lethal, and men use guns more than any other method, suicide statistics in countries that have tight gun control laws don’t support the argument that removing guns will reduce suicide rates on the whole. Mark Antonio Wright makes this point in “Ezra Klein is Wrong: Gun Control Doesn’t Reduce Suicide Rates.” Like Taylor, Klein argues that reducing gun availability would decrease the suicide rate. But when you look at countries with the world’s strictest gun laws, this argument doesn’t hold up. Even if you remove guns from a home, a person who wants to commit suicide will still find other means. Wright first takes us to Australia, where there seems to be a relationship between its buy-back gun program and a drop in the suicide rate. But “the reduction occurred at the same time as an overall reduction in the Australian suicide rate. What’s more, firearm-related suicides had been declining in Australia for nearly ten years before the 1996 restrictions on gun ownership.” Next, we go to Japan, which has the world’s most restrictive gun-control laws. While the country does have low homicide rates, it has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, nearly twice the U.S. rate! The same is true in South Korea, where handguns are practically nonexistent, but the country has the highest suicide rate in the developed world. The reason for the high rates of suicide are social and cultural factors, not the availability of guns. “Guns are certainly not a factor in the suicide rate,” Wright says. “Along with hanging, drowning, and jumping off of buildings, ingesting pesticides was the method of choice for nearly 25 percent of South Korean suicides between 2006 and 2010. In 2012, more than 14,000 South Koreans took their own lives.” The same is true for other nations, such as Hungary, Poland, France, Cuba, Belgium, and Austria. They all have higher suicide rates than the United States but have stricter gun control policies. Granted, there are countries with strict gun laws that have slightly lower suicide rates than America (e.g., New Zealand, Canada, Sweden, and Ireland), but given that this is not the case across the board, cultural variations, and not gun laws, must be taken into account.

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