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

Cooke 15

Plan drains polcap.

For a brief and shining moment, it looked this week as if Barack Obama had finally acknowledged that there were limits upon his power. Responding to the news that Hillary Clinton was hoping to achieve federal gun control by fiat, the White House did everything but scoff. Clinton’s idea, a staffer told the Washington Post, had been examined in detail a while back, and then rejected out of hand. Her proposal, he added, was likely to “present new and unforeseen enforcement problems,” to “create untold logistical . . . difficulties,” and, ultimately, to be “subject to legal challenge.” The administration, he concluded, “still has not found a way to make it work.” Fewer than 48 hours later, the White House conceded that it was aiming to move ahead with the plan. Politically speaking, this turnabout would be a considerable mistake. Although Americans are happy to tell pollsters that they favor limited gun control, their when-it-comes-to-it enthusiasm remains minimal. “Eye-popping majorities of Democratic, Republican, and independent voters back . . . boilerplate measures,” Noah Rothman recorded yesterday in Commentary. “But when asked if voters prefer stricter gun control measures, only a majority of Democrats agreed. Just one-third of independent voters and less than one-quarter of GOP survey respondents welcomed new gun control measures.” If the polls are to be believed, this reluctance is in part the product of a lack of trust in the federal government; in part the result of a belief that gun laws don’t actually work; and in part the result of harsh demarcation lines that have been draw in the broader culture wars. If the White House wants to overcome the intransigence, it will have to spend some capital.

Muller 15

Util affirms—self-defense irrelevant because of rule of law.

Muller 15 Vincent C. Muller “Gun Control: A European Perspective” Essays in Philosophy Volume 16 Issue 2 Philosophy & Gun Control Article 7 http://philpapers.org/archive/MLLGCA.pdf JW

But what about self-defence? I’m afraid that if a functioning state provides general protection, then a general permission of guns for armed self-defence clearly tilts the utility scale to the negative. So generally permitting guns for self-defence is bad for such a society. What matters for this calculation is not how safe I ‘feel’ or how much I ‘trust’ the state to do its job. It is just a matter of objective utility, so while the traditionally lower trust in state authority in the US is part of the explanation for attitudes, it cannot be part of the justification. vi To make this point is not to suggest that more guns cause more murders and to support this claim with a statistical correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates. Correlation is not causation and, as (Lott 2014) points out, that correlation is by no means clear-cut. My point here is a much simpler one: Imagine two worlds, one (a) with tight gun control and one (b) with loose gun control and now estimate which of the two has more happiness and less pain in it. Assuming that both worlds have a functioning state that guarantees the rule of law, it is clear that world (a) has less pain and more happiness overall, so we have a moral obligation to bring it about.

Ingraham 14

Best studies prove—guns increase crime.

Ingraham 14 Christopher (reporter for the Washington Post) “More guns, more crime: New research debunks a central thesis of the gun rights movement” The Washington Post November 14^th 2014 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/11/14/more-guns-more-crime-new-research-debunks-a-central-thesis-of-the-gun-rights-movement/ JW

"More guns, less crime" - surely you've heard this mantra before? There's even an entire book devoted to it. As Emily Badger noted awhile back, it has become a staple of our national gun control debate: "The idea that more guns lead to less crime appears on gun policy 'fact sheets,' as evidence debunking gun control 'myths,' in congressional committee reports." The notion stems from a paper published in 1997 by economists John Lott and David Mustard, who looked at county-level crime data from 1977 to 1992 and concluded that "allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and it appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths." Of course, the study of gun crime has advanced significantly since then (no thanks to Congress). Some researchers have gone so far as to call Lott and Mustard's original study "completely discredited." One of the major critiques of the study came from the National Research Council, which in 2004 extended the data through the year 2000 and ultimately concluded that "with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates." Or in other words, "More guns, less crime? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" Now, Stanford law professor John Donohue and his colleagues have added another full decade to the analysis, extending it through 2010, and have concluded that the opposite of Lott and Mustard's original conclusion is true: more guns equal more crime. "The totality of the evidence based on educated judgments about the best statistical models suggests that right-to-carry laws are associated with substantially higher rates" of aggravated assault, robbery, rape and murder, Donohue said in an interview with the Stanford Report. The evidence suggests that right-to-carry laws are associated with an 8 percent increase in the incidence of aggravated assault, according to Donohue. He says this number is likely a floor, and that some statistical methods show an increase of 33 percent in aggravated assaults involving a firearm after the passage of right-to-carry laws. These findings build on and strengthen the conclusions of Donohue's earlier research, which only used data through 2006. In addition to having nearly two decades' worth of additional data to work with, Donohue's findings also improve upon Lott and Mustard's research by using a variety of different statistical models, as well as controlling for a number of confounding factors, like the crack epidemic of the early 1990s. These new findings are strong. But there's rarely such a thing as a slam-dunk in social science research. Donohue notes that "different statistical models can yield different estimated effects, and our ability to ascertain the best model is imperfect." Teasing out cause from effect in social science research is often a fraught proposition. But for this very reason it's important for policymakers on both sides of the gun control debate to exercise caution in interpreting the findings of any one study. Gun rights advocates have undoubtedly placed too much stock in Lott and Mustard's original study, which is now going on 20 years old. The best policy is often informed by good research. And as researchers revisit their data and assumptions, it makes sense for policymakers to do the same.

Directory: file -> view
view -> Western Europe after wwii
view -> Author study: paul fleischman
view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide
view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg
view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh
view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce
view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy
view -> Table of Contents Lesson #
view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad

Download 0.99 Mb.

Share with your friends: