Resolved: In the United States, private ownership of handguns ought to be banned
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- Donohue 15
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Freedland 13Allowing shootings to happen kills soft power.Freedland 13 Jonathan (the Guardian's executive editor) “Washington DC shootings: America's gun disease diminishes its soft power” The Guardian September 17th 2013 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/17/washington-dc-shootings-america-gun-disease JW But America's gun disease diminishes its soft power. It makes the country seem less like a model and more like a basket case, afflicted by a pathology other nations strive to avoid. When similar gun massacres have struck elsewhere – including in Britain – lawmakers have acted swiftly to tighten controls, watching as the gun crime statistics then fell. In the decade after the rules were toughened in Australia in 1996, for example, firearm-related homicides fell by 59%, while suicides involving guns fell by 65%. But the US stays stubbornly where it is, refusing to act. When President Obama last tried, following the deaths of 20 children and six staff at Sandy Hook at the end of 2012, his bill fell at the first senate hurdle. He had not proposed banning a single weapon or bullet – merely expanding the background checks required of someone wanting to buy a gun. But even that was too much. The national security pundits who worry how a US president is perceived when he is incapable of protecting the lives of innocent Syrians abroad should think how it looks when he is incapable of protecting the lives of innocent Americans at home. On guns, the US – so often the world leader in innovation and endeavour – is the laggard, stuck at the bottom of the global class. Bill Clinton perfectly distilled the essence of soft power when he said in 2008, "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power." He was right. But every time a disturbed or angry individual is able to vent his rage with an assault weapon, killing innocents with ease, the power of America's example fades a little more. Donohue 15Other countries prove—gun regulation reduces mass shootings.Donohue 15 John “Ban guns, end shootings? How evidence stacks up around the world” CNN August 27th 2015 http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/27/opinions/us-guns-evidence/ JW Gun control around the world As an academic exercise, one might speculate whether law could play a constructive role in reducing the number or deadliness of mass shootings. Most other advanced nations apparently think so, since they make it far harder for someone like the Charleston killer to get his hands on a Glock semiautomatic handgun or any other kind of firearm (universal background checks are common features of gun regulation in other developed countries). • Germany: To buy a gun, anyone under the age of 25 has to pass a psychiatric evaluation (presumably 21-year-old Dylann Roof would have failed). • Finland: Handgun license applicants are only allowed to purchase firearms if they can prove they are active members of regulated shooting clubs. Before they can get a gun, applicants must pass an aptitude test, submit to a police interview, and show they have a proper gun storage unit. • Italy: To secure a gun permit, one must establish a genuine reason to possess a firearm and pass a background check considering both criminal and mental health records (again, presumably Dylann Roof would have failed). • France: Firearms applicants must have no criminal record and pass a background check that considers the reason for the gun purchase and evaluates the criminal, mental, and health records of the applicant. (Dylann Roof would presumably have failed in this process). • United Kingdom and Japan: Handguns are illegal for private citizens. While mass shootings as well as gun homicides and suicides are not unknown in these countries, the overall rates are substantially higher in the United States than in these competitor nations. While NRA supporters frequently challenge me on these statistics saying that this is only because "American blacks are so violent," it is important to note that white murder rates in the U.S. are well over twice as high as the murder rates in any of these other countries. Australia hasn't had a mass shooting since 1996 Winkler 11Historically, gun regulations cause racism and discrimination since they let some groups have firearms but others not.Winkler 11 Adam (Professor of Law at UCLA) “Is Gun Control Racist?” The Daily Beast October 9th 2011 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/10/09/adam-winkler-gun-fight-author-on-gun-control-s-racism.html JW Actually, the gun-rights websites are on to something. As I discovered in researching my new book Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, for much of our history, gun regulation has been tainted by the stains of racism and discrimination. Today, the story is more complex than the simplistic slogans of gun-rights advocates. But there is no denying that racial politics have profoundly shaped America’s gun laws. Gun-rights hardliners are fond of dismissing nearly any gun-safety effort as a violation of the Second Amendment. Yet the men who wrote [the Second Amendment] and ratified that provision had extensive gun laws—and many of them were racially discriminatory. Not only did they support[e] laws prohibiting slaves from possessing guns, they also disarmed free blacks, who the Founders feared might join together with their brethren in chains to revolt. The fear of blacks with guns was one of the reasons behind the Supreme Court’s notorious decision in the Dred Scott case. Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion insisted that blacks could not be citizens because, if they were, they’d have all the protections of the Bill of Rights, including the right to “full liberty of speech... to hold public meetings on political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” America’s most horrific racist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, began with gun control at the very top of its agenda. Before the Civil War, blacks in the South had never been allowed to possess guns. During the war, however, blacks obtained guns for the first time. Some served as soldiers in black units in the Union Army, which allowed its men, black and white, to take their guns home with them as partial payment of past due wages. Other Southern blacks bought guns in the underground marketplace, which was flooded with firearms produced for the war. After the war, Southern states adopted discriminatory laws like the Black Codes, which among other things barred the freedmen from having guns. Racist whites began to form posses that would go out at night to terrorize blacks—and take away those newly obtained firearms. The groups took different names: the “Men of Justice” in Alabama; the “Knights of the White Camellia” in Louisiana; the “Knights of the Rising Sun” in Texas. The group formed in Pulaski, Tenn., became the most well-known: the Ku Klux Klan. Whites believed that they had to confiscate black people’s guns in order to reestablish white supremacy and prevent blacks from fighting back. Blacks who refused to turn over their only means of self-defense were lynched. Overly aggressive gun control often sparks a backlash, and that’s exactly what happened after the Civil War. Determined to protect the freedmen’s rights, Congress passed legislation like the Freedmen’s Bureau Act and the nation’s first Civil Rights Act. As the former law stated, blacks were entitled to “the full and equal benefit of all laws... concerning personal security... including the constitutional right to bear arms.” When these laws proved ineffective, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was added, guaranteeing all Americans the “privileges or immunities of citizenship”—by which the drafters meant the protections afforded in the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment. Today, we think of the National Rifle Association as a no-compromises opponent of gun control. In the 1920s, however, the NRA helped draft and promote restrictive gun laws in state after state—laws that were, in part, motivated by racism. Immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe, who were known to carry around concealed pistols, were increasingly blamed for a spike in urban crime. Karl Frederick, the NRA’s president, helped draft the Uniform Firearms Act, model legislation that required a license to carry around a handgun. According to the law, only “suitable people” with a “proper reason” for being armed in public were eligible. Police used this law as an excuse to keep disfavored minorities from having guns. His reputation for peaceful non-violence notwithstanding, Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a license to carry a gun in the late 1950s after his home was firebombed. The recipient of daily death threats, the civil rights leader clearly had good reason to carry around a gun to defend himself. Yet Alabama police exercised the discretion the law afforded them to deny King’s permit request. Armed guards sought to protect King after that, and for a time guns were commonplace in his parsonage. William Worthy, a journalist who covered the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reported that during one visit he went to sit down on an armchair and, to his surprise, almost sat on a loaded gun. One of King’s advisers, Glenn Smiley, called King’s home “an arsenal.” In the late 1960s, Congress and numerous states passed a wave of new gun-control laws and, once again, race and racism were not far from the surface. In California, conservatives like Governor Ronald Reagan responded to the Black Panthers, who conducted armed “police patrols” to oversee how officers treated blacks in Oakland, by endorsing new gun laws to restrict people from having loaded guns in public. In 1967, after Newark and Detroit suffered the worst race riots in American history, a federal report put part of the blame for the incidents on the easy availability of guns in urban neighborhoods. The next year, Congress passed the first federal gun-control law in decades. Among other things, the Gun Control Act of 1968 tried to restrict “Saturday Night Specials”—the cheap, easily available guns often used by urban (read, black) youth. The law, which was also supported by the NRA’s leadership, occasioned one critic to complain that the Gun Control Act was “passed not to control guns but to control blacks.” Like the Black Codes and the KKK’s disarmament efforts, the gun-control laws of the 1960s also led to a backlash. In the 1970s, a hardline group of NRA members staged a takeover of the organization’s leadership and committed the NRA to aggressive political lobbying to defeat gun control. Ironically, it was laws intended to limit access to guns by black and urban radicals and supported by conservatives like Reagan that fueled the rise of the modern gun-rights movement, which is famous for being white, rural, and right-leaning. Some whites thought the government was coming to get their guns next. In the years since, the racial politics of gun control have shifted dramatically. Given the high incidence of crime in some black communities, African-American politicians have sought measures to reduce gun violence. And it is primarily white politicians, representing white communities, that oppose gun control. America’s most recent gun-control efforts, such as requiring federally licensed dealers to conduct background checks, aren’t designed to keep blacks from having guns, only criminals. Of course, the unfortunate reality is that the criminal population in America is disproportionately made up of racial minorities. 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:
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