FI Aff Hodge Podge

Cases
1AC Gun Ban

Contention 1 is Framework
The standard is minimizing structural barriers, defined as alleviating the material
conditions that commit structural violence on marginalized groups.
1] Structural violence is based in moral exclusion, which is fundamentally flawed
because exclusion is not based on dessert but rather on arbitrarily perceived
differences.
Winter and Leighton 99 |Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter|[Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych,
Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Leighton: PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the
University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and justice and intergroup responses to
transgressions of justice] Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century. Pg 4-5 ghs//VA
Finally, to
recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about how and why we
tolerate it, questions which often have painful answers for the privileged elite who unconsciously support it. A final
question of this section is how and why we allow ourselves to be so oblivious to structural violence. Susan Opotow offers an intriguing set of answers, in her article
Social Injustice. She argues that our normal perceptual cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-
groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if
it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or
irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those
who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become
either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but
Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be
vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships,
communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if
we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural
violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce
structural violence. All the authors in this section note that the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed structural
violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it. In the long run, reducing structural violence by reclaiming neighborhoods, demanding social justice and
living wages, providing prenatal care, alleviating sexism, and celebrating local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace.
2] Abstract theories of justice that strive towards an ideal ignore systems of

oppression - instead we should adopt non-ideal theories that recognize current
injustice. --- That requires positive obligations
Mills 09: , C. W. (2009), Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 47: 161184
Now how can this ideala society not merely without a past history of racism but without races themselvesserve
to adjudicate the merits of competing policies aimed at correcting for a long history of white
supremacy manifest in Native American expropriation, African slavery, residential and educational
segregation, large differentials in income and huge differentials in wealth, nonwhite
underrepresentation in high-prestige occupations and overrepresentation in the prison system,
contested national narratives and cultural representations, widespread white evasion and bad faith
on issues of their racial privilege, and a corresponding hostile white backlash against (what remains of)
those mild corrective measures already implemented? Obviously, it cannot. As Thomas Nagel concedes: Ideal theory
enables you to say when a society is unjust, because it falls short of the ideal. But it does not tell you
what to do if, as is almost always the case, you find yourself in an unjust society, and want to
correct that injustice (2003a, 82). Ideal theory represents an unattainable target that would require us
to roll back the clock and start over. So in a sense it is an ideal with little or no practical worth. What is
required is the nonideal (rectificatory) ideal that starts from the reality of these injustices and then seeks
some fair means of correcting for them, recognizing that in most cases the original
prediscrimination situation (even if it can be intelligibly characterized and stipulated) cannot be restored. Trying to rectify systemic
black disadvantage through affirmative action is not the equivalent of not discriminating against blacks, especially when there are no blacks to be discriminated
against. Far from being indispensable to the elaboration of nonideal theory, ideal theory would have been revealed to be largely useless for it. But the situation is
worse than that. As the example just given illustrates, it is not merely a matter of an ideal with problems of operationalization and relevance, but of an ideal likely to
lend itself more readily to retrograde political agendas. If the ideal ideal rather than the rectificatory ideal is to guide us, then a world without races and any kind of
distinctiondrawing by race may seem to be an attractive goal. One takes the ideal to be colorblind nondiscrimination, as appropriate for a society beginning from the
state of nature, and thencompletely ignoring the nonideal history that has given whites a systemic illicit advantage over people of colorconflates together as
discrimination all attempts to draw racial distinctions for public policy goals, no matter what their motivation, on the grounds that this perpetuates race and
invidious differential treatment by race. In the magisterial judgment of Chief Justice John Roberts in the June 2007 Supreme Court decision on the Seattle and
Louisville cases where schools were using race as a factor to maintain diversity, The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the
basis of race,6 a statement achieving the remarkable feat of depicting not merely as true, but as tautologically true, the equating of Jim Crow segregation and the
attempt to remedy Jim Crow tion! What is ideally called for under ideal circumstances is not, or at least is not necessarily, what is ideally called for under nonideal
circumstances. Claiming
that all we need to do is to cease (what is here characterized as) discrimination ignores the
differential advantages and privileges that have accumulated in the white population because of the past history of
discrimination. So the defense in terms of ideal theory is doubly problematic. In the first place, ideal theory was never supposed to be an end in itself, but a means to
improving our handling of nonideal matters, and the fact that Rawls and his disciples and commentators have for the most part stayed in the realm of the ideal
represents an evasion of the imperative of dealing with what were supposed to be the really pressing issues. And in the second place, it is questionable in any case how
So it is not merely that ideal theory has not
useful the ideal ideal in the Rawlsian sense is or ever would have been in assisting this task.
come to the aid of those dealing with nonideal injustice but that it was unlikely to have been of
much help when and if it ever did arrive.
3] Debate should deal with real-world consequencesideal theories ignore the

concrete nature of the world and legitimize oppression.
Curry 14, (Dr. Tommy J. Curry, The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century,
Victory Briefs, 2014, FT)
Despite the pronouncement of debate as an activity and intellectual exercise pointing to the real
world consequences of dialogue, thinking, and (personal) politics when addressing issues of racism,
sexism, economic disparity, global conflicts, and death, many of the discussions concerning these
ongoing challenges to humanity are fixed to a paradigm which sees the adjudication of material
disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory over the other. In Ideal Theory as
Ideology, Charles Mills outlines the problem contemporary theoretical-performance styles in policy
debate and value-weighing in Lincoln-Douglass are confronted with in their attempts to get at the concrete problems in
our societies. At the outset, Mills concedes that ideal theory applies to moral theory as a whole (at least to
normative ethics as against metaethics); [s]ince ethics deals by definition with
normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, [it is set] against factual/descriptive issues. At the most general
level, the conceptual chasm between what emerges as actual problems in the world (e.g.: racism, sexism,
poverty, disease, etc.) and how we frame such problems theoreticallythe assumptions and shared
ideologies we depend upon for our problems to be heard and accepted as a worthy problem by an
audienceis the most obvious call for an anti-ethical paradigm, since such a paradigm insists on the
actual as the basis of what can be considered normatively. Mills, however, describes this chasm as a problem of an
ideal-as-descriptive model which argues that for any actual-empirical-observable social phenomenon (P), an ideal
of (P) is necessarily a representation of that phenomenon. In the idealization of a social phenomenon (P), one
necessarily has to abstract away from certain features of (P) that is observed before abstraction
occurs. This gap between what is actual (in the world), and what is represented by theories and
politics of debaters proposed in rounds threatens any real discussions about the concrete nature of
oppression and the racist economic structures which necessitate tangible policies and reorienting
changes in our value orientations. As Mills states: What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on
idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual, so what we are seeking to resolve on the
basis of thought is in fact incomplete, incorrect, or ultimately irrelevant to the actual problems which our theories seek to address. Our
attempts to situate social disparity cannot simply appeal to the ontologization of social
phenomenonmeaning we cannot suggest that the various complexities of social problems (which are
constantly emerging and undisclosed beyond the effects we observe) are
totalizable by any one set of theories within an
ideological frame be it our most cherished notions of Afro-pessimism, feminism, Marxism, or the
like. At best, theoretical endorsements make us aware of sets of actions to address ever developing
problems in our empirical world, but even this awareness does not command us to only do X, but
rather do X and the other ideas which compliment the material conditions addressed by the action
X. As a whole, debate (policy and LD) neglects the need to do X in order to remedy our cast-away-ness
among our ideological tendencies and politics. How then do we pull ourselves from this seeming ir-recoverability of thought
in general and in our endorsement of socially actualizable values like that of the living wage? It is my position that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s
thinking about the need for a living wage was a unique, and remains an underappreciated, resource in our attempts to impose value reorientation
(be it through critique or normative gestures) upon the actual world. In other words, King aims to reformulate the values which deny the
legitimacy of the living wage, and those values predicated on the flawed views of the worker, Blacks, and the colonized (dignity, justice, fairness,
rights, etc.) used to currently justify the living wages in under our contemporary moral parameters.
Contention 2 is the Advocacy
The United States federal government will prohibit the ownership of private
handguns and implement a reimbursement policy to collect handguns currently in
circulation. I reserve the right to clarify.
Etzioni and Hellend 92: [Amitai Etzioni and Steven Hellend, The Case for Domestic Disarmament, The Communitarian Network,
1992] VM
PROPOSED HANDGUN LEGISLATION Prohibits the importation, exportation, manufacture,

sale, purchase, transfer, receipt, possession, or transportation of handguns. Establishes a "grace
period" during which time handguns may be turned into any law enforcement agency with
impunity and for reimbursement at the greater of either $25 or the fair market value of the gun. Allows an exception for: *
agencies of federal, state, or local government (military and law enforcement) * collectors of antique
(nonserviceable) firearms * federally-licensed handgun sporting clubs; the clubs must be founded for bonafide target or
sport shooting; must maintain possession and control of the handguns used by its members; must have procedures and facilities for keeping the handguns secure when
not in a local law enforcement facility; and may not have as members persons whose membership would violate state of federal law *
federally-licensed
professional security guard services [operating with similar conditions as those set for handgun clubs] Sets up penalties of up
to $5,000, or up to 5 years imprisonment, or both, for violation of the provisions of the Act. We suggest
the following friendly amendment to Senator Chafee's proposed legislation: Extend the above prohibitions to ammunition for handguns, allow for the exceptions to
apply also to ammunition, and establish a "grace period" during which those who turn over ammunition to any law enforcement agency would be reimbursed at the
fair market value.
Contention 3 is Intimate Partner Violence
Status quo American guns laws disproportionately harm victims of intimate partner
violence reform is necessary.
Everytown 14 bracketed for language: [Everytown for Gun Safety, GUNS AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN:
America's Uniquely Lethal Domestic Violence Problem, 6/16/14]
Like many women who suffer domestic abuse, Zina Daniel had endured years of escalating attacks by her husband and finally sought a restraining order. Under
federal law, this prohibited her husband from buying or possessing firearms, and for good reason. His threats terrorize my every waking moment, she wrote in her
petition. He said he would kill me if I left him or even contacted the police.1 Zinas fear was justified: two days later her husband exploited a loophole in our
nations laws and bought a gun from an unlicensed seller on the website Armslist.com, evading a background check. Three days later Zina was dead. Americas
weak gun laws failed Zina, just as they fail countless other American women each year. In theory, these laws
are designed to protect women in Zinas circumstances, by keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers. But in practice, the laws are poorly
defined and poorly enforced, and the results are as predictable as they are devastating. Women in
the United States are eleven times more likely to be murdered with guns than women in other high-
income countries.2 When it comes to gun violence, the most dangerous place for a woman in the
developed world is America. Domestic violence in America is to a significant degree a problem of
gun violence. Over the past 25 years, more intimate partner homicides in the U.S. have been
committed with guns than with all other weapons combined.3 And people with a history of
committing domestic violence [IPV] are five times more likely to subsequently murder an intimate
partner when a firearm is in the house.4 At the same time, an astonishing share of gun violence in America is driven by domestic violence.
More than half of women murdered with guns in the U.S. in 2011 at least 53 percent were
killed by intimate partners or family members.5 And research by Everytown for Gun Safety establishes that this is also true for mass
shootings: in 57 percent of the mass shootings between January 2009 and June 2014, the perpetrator
killed an intimate partner or family member.6 Because of the risk that firearms pose when they intersect with domestic violence, a
series of federal and state laws aim to keep guns out of the hands of the most dangerous domestic violence offenders. The strongest laws prohibit domestic abusers and
stalkers from buying or possessing guns, require background checks for all gun sales, and create processes to ensure that abusers and stalkers surrender the guns
already in their possession. When these laws are on the books and enforced properly, they save lives. In the past sixteen years, the background check system has kept
hundreds of thousands of guns out of abusers hands and prevented countless crimes.7 And in states that require background checks for all handgun sales, there are 38
percent fewer women shot to death by intimate partners.8 But because of loopholes in these laws and failures to enforce them, they do too little to curb the uniquely
lethal American problem of guns and violence against women. Four gaps in the law are particularly harmful: First, federal
law does nothing to
keep guns out of the hands of abusive dating partners or convicted stalkers. The federal laws
prohibiting domestic abusers from buying or owning guns do not apply to dangerous people
convicted of misdemeanor stalking offenses or to dating partnerseven though more women in the U.S. are killed by their
dating partners than by their spouses.9 In Everytowns analysis of mass shootings, 25 percent of perpetrators that targeted an intimate partner had never married them
nor had a child together, and thus would not likely qualify as intimate partners under current law. Second, in 35 states, state law does not
prohibit all people convicted of misdemeanor [IPV] domestic violence crimes and all people subject
to restraining orders from buying or using guns.10 So while domestic abusers in those states cannot possess guns under federal law,
local law enforcement and prosecutors do not have the tools they need to enforce those restrictions. Third, federal law (and the law in most
states) allows domestic abusers and stalkers to easily evade gun prohibitions by purchasing guns
from unlicensed, private sellers. Federal law only requires background checks for gun sales at licensed dealers. Sixteen states require checks on
all handgun sales, but in the remaining states, prohibited abusers seeking to avoid a background check have little trouble purchasing a gun from an unlicensed seller
they meet online or at a gun show. Prohibited domestic abusers are well aware of this loopholeand have taken advantage of it to deadly effect. In a first-of-its-kind
investigation of illegal online gun sales, Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that 1 of 4 prohibited purchasers seeking guns online had a domestic violence arrest.
Finally, forty-one states do not require all prohibited domestic abusers to relinquish guns they
already own. Without a clear law on the books that provides an enforceable process by which
offenders relinquish their firearms, it is too easy for dangerous abusers to keep their guns even
after they commit offenses that prohibit them from having them. The strongest state laws establish a clear process that
courts and law enforcement can use to make sure prohibited batterers turn in their guns, but far too many states lack these laws or do not enforce them adequately.
Gun control is a critical feminist issue the aff checks back against misogynistic
tendencies in American culture and reduces violence.
CHEUNG 15: [KYLIE CHEUNG, News & Politics writer for Bustle, Why Gun Control Is A Feminist Issue, Because Mass Shootings
Disproportionately Target Women, 10/5/2015]
On Thursday, yet another mass shooting occurred, this time on the Umpqua Community College campus. The shooting resulted in 10 deaths, including the gunman, and a renewed national
gun control is seldom regarded as

dialogue around the need for gun control. Though often discussed from the crucial angles of public safety and mental health,
the feminist issue it arguably is, The Guardian points out. It's rarely taken into account that not only are many acts of gun
violence performed in the context of [IPV] domestic violence, according to Bloomberg, but some
recent mass shootings have also been reportedly motivated by misogyny. Some psychologists have even
identified pervasive societal concepts about hyper-masculinity as motivating factors in mass
shootings, which are predominantly carried out by male shooters. Allowing men with histories of
domestic abuse to obtain guns, or not performing thorough background checks that could reveal
violent histories, exposes women to be disproportionately victimized by gun violence. A study
published in 2013 by the University of Washington revealed that a strong majority of mass
shootings in America were carried out by white males and found a "correlation between feelings of
entitlement among white males and homicidal revenge against a specific demographic." One of feminism's
overarching goals is to check the destructive consequences of male and racial privilege in society, and according to the 2013 study, gun violence is arguably among these. Simultaneously, in
many recent cases, the "specific demographic" in question is often racial minorities or women. In July, after leading a mass
shooting at a screening of Trainwreck in a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, it was revealed that John Russell Houser, the gunman identified by police, had a
history of violence toward his wife and daughter and misogynistic tendencies that potentially
motivated him to carry out the shooting. According to the Associated Press, Houser's estranged wife once had to remove guns from their home and had him
committed, alleging he was "a danger to himself and others" and citing his "threatening behavior" in protesting their daughter's wedding. Although Houser never directly proclaimed or recorded
his motive, it's certainly worth noting that he selected the predominantly female audience of Trainwreck, a feminist comedy written and produced by a famous feminist comedian, to conduct his
shooting spree. Houser legally obtained the gun that he used to kill three (including himself) and injure nine, according to CNN, despite a history of allegations of threatening his wife and
daughter, mental health issues, and posts inciting religious extremism from social media accounts associated with him. In some of these posts, Houser seems to have praised the anti-LGBTQ
Westboro Baptist Church and shared links to misogynistic web pages discussing the roles of women in the church. The International Business Times reports that according to CNN investigative
correspondent Drew Griffin, a background check had been performed on Houser prior to selling him firearms, but his record lacked any convictions for serious crimes, despite domestic violence
Griffin's findings points out

allegations and minor legal issues. Thus, Houser simply did not raise any red flags on the "instant background checks" performed on him.
two immediate concerns: the first being that domestic violence simply isn't taken seriously enough,
and the second being that in many cases, background checks for gun purchases aren't thorough
enough. Two women paid the price for gun control shortcomings in a shooting that was potentially motivated by one man's misogyny. In May 2014, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six
and injured 14 in the notorious Isla Vista shootings in California, as he attempted to carry out his"retribution" against women for rejecting him, as well as sexually active men he envied. In a
disturbing video Rodger posted prior to the shootings, he claimed he would "slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blond slut [he saw]," according to the LA Times. In the video, Rodger also
voiced his sense of entitlement to sexual favors from women, believing all women deserved to be punished for "rejecting" him. In a 140-page manifesto, Rodger went so far as to propose all
women be kept in concentration camps, as if it weren't clear enough his actions were rooted in deep-seated misogyny. According to the Los Angeles Times, all three guns registered under
Rodger's name had been obtained legally. Parents of Rodger's victims placed blame on the NRA and politicians above Rodger himself for not carrying out safe gun control regulation, and gun
control proponents pointed out that doctors as well as Rodger's parents had issued warnings about his mental health, according to NBC News. The Isla Vista shootings serve as a clearer example
of how gun control could prevent violence that disproportionately targets women. More recently, in September, two Delta State University professors were shot and killed by one professor's live-
in partner, identified as Shannon Lamb.Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti pointed out that the shooting was rarely referred to the act of domestic violence that it was. "Until we start talking
seriously about the intersection of gun violence and intimate partner violence, we will continue to watch as murders many of them preventable are perpetrated again and again," Valenti
writes. And indeed, according to Bloomberg, of all women murdered by intimate partners between 2001 and 2012, 55 percent were killed with guns. Bloomberg also reports that women in the
a strong majority of guns

United States are 11 times more likely to be killed with guns than women in any other "high-income country." Most disturbing of all,
involved in such acts of violence are obtained entirely legally. Obviously, women aren't the only
people affected by gun violence, nor are they the only group who would benefit from stronger gun
control laws. Domestic violence appears to be more of a strong risk factor of loose gun control than
a direct consequence of it. However, there is no denying that gunmen involved in mass shootings are frequently white males: between 1982 and 2012, all but one mass
shooter were male, and in 44 of 62 case, the shooter was a white male. The desire to kill many is often rooted in some mental instability, but as Tanya Luhrmann, an anthropologist at
Stanford University, points out, "Mental illness actually does reflect the local culture." Tendencies toward violence
are subtly rooted in how men are brought up by society, which arguably glorifies aggression in
males. And as multiple studies reveal, a sense of born entitlement develops naturally in boys, who are more likely
to feel unjustly wronged and respond with violence than females who encounter rejection and
hardship. The simple fact is that an ingrained sense of male entitlement isn't going anywhere, but gun control is a critical feminist issue as it
could check the tragic consequences of male entitlement turned violent.
IPV effects non-heteronormative relationships at similar rates to straight couples -
but they have less access to resources like shelters
VoC No Date INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE, http://victimsofcrime.org/,
http://victimsofcrime.org/docs/default-source/ncvrw2015/2015ncvrw_stats_ipv.pdf?sfvrsn=2 No date
Accessed 1/9/16
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people (LGBT) reported 2,679 incidents of intimate partner violence to local anti-
violence programs in 2012. Twenty-one of these incidents resulted in murder.23 Of LGBT people killed by their intimate
partner in 2012, 47.6 percent were men, and 28.6 percent were women.24 Of LGBT intimate partner violence victims who reported to local
anti-violence programs in 2012, 32.6 percent were women, and 24.5 percent were men.25 In cases where the age of the victims was recorded
when victims reported to local anti-violence programs, 40.3 percent of LGBT intimate partner violence victims were 19 to 29 years of age, and
1.6 percent were 60 or older.26 In 2012, 3.7
percent of LGBT intimate partner violence victims sought access to
domestic violence shelters. Of those who sought shelter, 14.3 percent were denied access.27 There was
an increase of police arrest of abusive partners in LGBT intimate partner violence cases from 28.4 percent in 2011 to 44 percent in 2012.28
Contention 4 is Suicide
Suicides are the largest source of gun violence in the US and current cultural norms
hide the reality of many victims. Empirics prove the DC gun ban decreased suicides
by handguns
MARIANI 15: [MIKE MARIANI , Columnist at Newsweek, Americas Biggest Gun Problem Is Suicide, Newsweek, 11/21/15]
Theres a culture of euphemism in obituaries involving gun suicide; died suddenly, died at
home and "passed unexpectedly" are all used to cover an ugly fact. This systemic aversion to the
topic has made it difficult for the general population to understand how suicide and gun ownership
overlap, and enables firearm suicide to flourish in darkness. For example, its rarely something people consider when
contemplating why someone took his own life; we dont say he owned a gun the way we cite things like clinical depression, financial woes and drug problemsbut
we probably should. Evidence
suggests guns are not just a means of executing a hard and fast decision to
kill oneself; they are a risk factor that should be considered alongside mental illness, substance
abuse and family history. David Hemenway, a professor of health policy and the director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center
(HICRC), has studied firearm violence and the relationship between guns and suicide in the U.S. for 15 years. In that time, he has amassed an abundance of statistical
evidence indicating that access to guns increases the chances of suicide. Why does Arizona have more suicides than Massachusetts? he asks. "Is it mental health, is
it diet, or is it alcohol or smoking, or is it depression? Its none of those. The one thing that explains different rates of suicide across regions, states and even cities is
simple: guns. In a study published in 2008 in the New England Journal of Medicine, Hemenway and his co-authors found that men were 3.7 times more likely to die
by gun suicide in the 15 states with the highest rates of gun ownership compared to the six states with the lowest. Women in the states with the highest gun ownership
were 7.9 times more likely to kill themselves with a firearm. And in a 2014 paper published in the International Review of
Law and Economics, Justin Briggs and Alexander Tabarrok found that for every 1 percentage
point increase in household gun ownership, suicide rates go up between 0.5 and 0.9 percent. The Briggs-
Tabarrok effect, as it became known, starkly illustrates how in America having more guns leads to more suicides. One of the great
misconceptions about suicide attempters is that, after considerable deliberation, they have reached
a point of no return. In fact, in many cases the complete opposite is true. In an oft-cited 2001 study published in
Suicide & Life-Threatening Behavior, 153 survivors of suicide attempts were asked when they had made the
decision to kill themselves. Seventy percent of the responders said they had decided to kill
themselves within an hour of the actual attempt; 24 percent said within less than five minutes. This
phenomenon is known as suicide impulsivity, and it seems to find its perfect match in firearms.
Shooting yourself does not entail the preparation of overdosing on pills or the grisly persistence of
slitting your wrists. It is immediate and requires zero protracted thought: the perfect mechanism
for the instant fulfillment of what might otherwise be a fleeting inclination. The problem is that firearms are
frighteningly lethal. The most common method of attempting suicide, overdosing on drugs, has a completion rate of just 3 percent (in other words, 97 percent of
attempters survive). Gun
suicide, by comparison, has a completion rate of 85 percent. This is surely gun
violence at its most virulentBerettas and Glock 17s crystallizing passing impulses into something
horrifically permanentand yet it is rarely, if ever, acknowledged as a gun issue. For years, the HICRC has
been trying to change this through its Means Matter campaign, a suicide prevention initiative focused on what is called "means restriction. The idea is that if we
can restrict the availability of lethal means for individuals showing warning signs of suicide, we can stymie impulsive attempters until the desire passes, saving lives.
There are convincing precedents. One is what suicide prevention experts refer to as the "British coal-gas story." In the 1950s, domestic gas in the United Kingdom
contained high levels of carbon monoxide, and self-administered gas inhalation poisoning was the leading means of suicide in the country. By the end of the decade,
carbon monoxide poisoning accounted for roughly 2,500 suicides a year, slightly under half the nations total. In the 1960s, the British government undertook the
detoxification of domestic gas, replacing the coal-derived gas high in carbon monoxide with nontoxic natural gas. By the early 1970s, the country's suicide rate had
dropped by almost a third. Even more directly relevant is the success of an Israeli Defense Forces policy change that went into effect in 2006. That year, in an effort to
prevent suicides in the military90 percent of which occurred with firearms, often when soldiers were on weekend leavethe military didnt let soldiers take their
firearms off base on weekends. The suicide rate fell by 40 percent. Despite those impressive results, codifying some form of means restriction into law in the U.S.
seems impossible. Heres where politics enters the fray. Firearm
suicide by its very nature is a confluence of two social
issuesgun rights and suicidethat are most often discussed and understood in isolation, the
former a polarizing political wedge calcified along party lines, and the latter typically interpreted in
the context of mental health and psychiatric illness. Truly substantive means restrictionimposing significantly more stringent
background checks on handguns, for examplewould require a level of political consensus that is just not possible in a U.S. where Second Amendment furor is as
strong as ever. Even small compromises between gun owners and activists are fought over with vehemence. Take trigger locks, for example, the small metal devices
that clamp around a guns trigger. Those fighting for means restriction argue that by legally requiring guns to be stored in a locked container or secured with a trigger
lock, you could create enough of an impediment to gun access that it would significantly cut down on suicide ratesall without actually taking peoples guns away.
But Massachusetts is the only state with such a legal requirement, and in 2008s District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court struck down a portion of the
Firearms Control Regulations Act that required all firearms in Washington, D.C.the city with some of the strictest gun laws in the countryto be kept unloaded or
trigger locked, deeming it a violation of the Second Amendment. The fight over trigger locks might seem petty, but the reality is that even incremental limitations on
gun access could have dramatic effects on suicide rates. Thats because people can and do usually overcome the desire to kill
themselves. DeseRae L. Stage, 32, a photographer and writer who lives in Philadelphia, is one such survivor. Trapped in an abusive relationship, one night in
2006, Stage says she lost it. After a desperate call to her girlfriend was coldly rebuffed, I just decided that that was it. She took enough wine and pills to end her
life, but her girlfriend alerted the police, who barged into her apartment. They took her to the emergency room, where she was treated and released three hours later.
Today, Stage is an outspoken advocate for suicide attempters as founder of theLive Through This project, in which survivors tell their stories. After years working
with survivors, she knows firsthand that if you can eliminate a suicidal persons access to a gun, he or she will likely survive to tell the tale. Theres this myth that
someone who is suicidal, when impeded from an attempt, will just find another way, she says. Not true. The data backs her up: Over
90 percent of
all attempters never die by suicide. Limit access to bridges and guns, and that number will surely
creep toward 100 in the U.S.
Empirics prove the DC gun ban decreased suicides by handguns

Wintemute et al 99: Garen J. Wintemute ~MD, MPH~, Carrie A Parham ~MS~, James Jay Beaumont
~PhD~, Mona Wright ~MPH~ and Christiana Drake ~PhD~; all of them ~work at the Massachusetts
Medical Society~, "Mortality Among Recent Purchasers of Handguns," The New England Journal of
Medicine, Volume 341, Number 21, November 19, 1999,
Reducing access to firearms within an entire population can prevent suicides by firearm.30-37 Rates of
suicide by firearm correlate very closely, both geographically and temporally, with measures of the
availability of firearms.33,38-40 In cross-sectional studies, stricter controls on access to firearms have
been found to be associated with lower rates of suicide by firearm.33,40,41 In New York City, where
handgun ownership has been strictly regulated since the early 20th century, rates of suicide by firearm are
very low; rates of suicide by other methods vary directly with the availability of those methods.42
Contention 5 is Atomization
The ethic of gun ownership is part and parcel with neoliberal ideology that we are
all self-interested and cannot be reliant on social structures this atomizes
communities and victim blames vulnerable populations.
Esposito and Finley 14 Luigi Esposito (Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Barry
University) and Laura Finley (Assistant professor of Sociology and Criminology at Barry University)
Beyond Gun Control: Examining Neoliberalism, Pro-gun Politics and Gun Violence in the United
States Theory in Action, Vol. 7, No. 2, April ( 2014) http://transformativestudies.org/wp-
content/uploads/10.3798tia.1937-0237.14011.pdf
LOOKING OUT FOR ONESELF: GUNS, RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM, AND NEOLIBERAL VIRTUE In a neoliberal world, a
virtuous citizen is one that is self-reliant, assumes personal responsibility for his/her own problems, and demands or
expects as little as possible from others, especially from government. This ideal version of a neoliberal subject is
consistent with the notion of rugged individualismi.e., the type of individual who embodies the
American pioneer ethic, steps up to any challenge, and lifts him/herself up by his/her boot straps. In contrast, any person who fails to
display these qualities is assumed to fail not only as an economic actor, but also as a moral being
(Soss, Fording, and Schram 2009, p. 4). Indeed, those who rely on welfare assistance and other government hand-outs are regarded as morally corrupt individuals
who live off tax payers and lack proper values. Personal virtue and responsibility, therefore, is expressed in behavior aimed at meeting ones personal needs and
resolving ones own personal problems. Among many in the pro-gun community, support for this neoliberal
tendency to associate virtue with rugged individualism and to emphasize private/personal solutions
to all social problems is easily discernible. In his book Gun Crusaders, Scott Melzer interviews members of the NRA and described the
following: [A] do-it-it-yourself attitude is the basic philosophy of most NRA members. Need protection? Buy a gun and learn to shoot.
Not earning enough money to make ends meet? Work harder. Cant afford child care or health care? Dont expect government to bail you out. Freedom and self-
reliance are indivisible. A country whose citizens have to rely on government for personal safety or basic needs is a country that is lazy and apathetic, and ultimately
undemocratic (Melzer, 2009, p. 28). The
parallel between Neoliberal ideology and what Melzer described as the
do-it-yourself philosophy embraced by members of the NRA cannot be clearer. Not only freedom
but democracy is assumed to be synonymous with self-reliance. Both neoliberal and pro-gun
philosophy reinforce one another in that both presuppose an atomistic view of the world in which
people are not understood as part of an interconnected community. Instead, all individuals are assumed to be autarkic
subjects concerned almost exclusively with their own private lives. Far from supporting freedom and democracy, therefore, critics argue that what easily results from
this social imagery is a depoliticized citizenry that is anathema to an effective democracy (e.g., McChesney 1999). As is well known, a viable democracy requires that
people have a strong sense of connection to their fellow citizens. Yet because of the emphasis on self-interest/self-reliance, neoliberalism attenuates
democracy by giving individuals a green light to prioritize their self-serving interest over those of a
community (e.g., Giroux 2008). The fanatical-like zeal with which many gun supporters prioritize Second Amendment rights over all other rights is consistent with this tendency.
While those who support the Second Amendment emphasize the individuals right to own firearms in order to protect his/her personal liberty, safety, or property, this right ignores the fact that
individuals are also members of a community. More specifically, an emphasis on the individuals right to own firearms overlooks how that right might infringe on other peoples right to live
without fear of unprovoked gun violence or unintended gun-related tragedies. And while ardent Second Amendment supporters might argue that guns are a tool to protect human life, there should
be little doubt that the logic behind pro-gun/ anti-gun control politicsmuch like the logic advanced by neoliberal ideology presupposes an every person to him/herself type of order as
normal and even virtuous. At most, armed individuals might decide to take heroic action and come to the rescue of others during incidents such as mass shootings (much like neoliberals
suggest that private charity should replace the welfare state as the primary mechanism for dealing people in need), but the individuals right to own firearms supersedes any communal/societal
concern associated with gun violence. Violence, according to many gun supporters, is an unavoidable fact of human life and getting increasingly worse (a common assumption not supported by
the evidence). Accordingly, it is ultimately the responsibility of mature, sane individuals to take the necessary measures to protect themselves and their families against this presumed reality. As
an example of this, consider a recent radio advertisement in which Milwaukee County Sheriff, David Clarke, gives citizens the following message: Im Sheriff David Clarke, and I want to talk to
you about something personalyour safety. Its no longer a spectator sport. simply calling 911 and waiting is no longer your best option.You can beg for mercy from a violent criminal, hide
under the bed, or you can fight back; but are you prepared? Consider taking a certified safety course in handling a firearm so you can defend yourself until we get there. You have a duty to
protect yourself and your family. Were partners now. Can I count on you? (quoted in Cirilli, 2013). Although the Sheriff invites law-abiding community members to be partners in the fight
against crime, what is ultimately proposed is an every person to him/herself type of crime control. Rather than supporting measures that might minimize violence by addressing its root causes,
owning a firearm and being competent at using them

people are encouraged to be personally responsible for their own safety. Therefore,
becomes a requisite for being a virtuous and responsible member of society. This sort of virtue is
also gendered and associated most closely with dominant American understandings of masculinity.
In the long-term, only the plan can create the cultural shift necessary to change the
undercurrent of gun violence in America Australia proves.
DONOHUE 15: [JOHN DONOHUE, columnist at Newsweek, Gun Control: What We Can Learn From Other Advanced
Countries, Newsweek, 10/3/15]
The story of Australia, which had 13 mass shootings in the 18-year period from 1979 to 1996 but
none in the succeeding 19 years, is worth examining. The turning point was the 1996 Port Arthur
massacre in Tasmania, in which a gunman killed 35 individuals using semiautomatic weapons. In
the wake of the massacre, the conservative federal government succeeded in implementing tough
new gun control laws throughout the country. A large array of weapons were bannedincluding the Glock semiautomatic handgun
used in the Charleston shootings. The government also imposed a mandatory gun buy back that substantially reduced gun possession in Australia. The effect was that
both gun suicides and homicides (as well as total suicides and homicides) fell. In addition, the 1996 legislation made it a crime to use firearms in self-defense. When I
mention this to disbelieving NRA supporters they insist that crime must now be rampant in Australia. In fact, the
Australian murder rate has
fallen to close to one per 100,000 while the U.S. rate, thankfully lower than in the early 1990s, is still
roughly at 4.5 per 100,000over four times as high. Moreover, robberies in Australia occur at only
about half the rate of the U.S. (58 in Australia versus 113.1 per 100,000 in the U.S. in 2012). How did Australia do it? Politically, it
took a brave prime minister to face the rage of Australian gun interests. John Howard wore a bullet-proof vest when
he announced the proposed gun restrictions in June 1996. The deputy prime minister was hung in effigy. But Australia did not have a
domestic gun industry to oppose the new measures, so the will of the people was allowed to emerge. And today, support for the safer, gun-
restricted Australia is so strong that going back would not be tolerated by the public. That
Australia hasnt had a mass shooting since 1996 is likely more than merely the result of the
considerable reduction in gunsits certainly not the case that guns have disappeared altogether. I
suspect that the country has also experienced a cultural shift between the shock of the Port Arthur
massacre and the removal of guns from every day life as they are no longer available for self-
defense and they are simply less present throughout the country. Troubled individuals, in other words, are not constantly
being reminded that guns are a means to address their alleged grievances to the extent that they
were in the past, or continue to be in the U.S.
Fear of state intervention privatizes security and is uniquely neoliberal lack of

action labels populations as disposable by forcing them to fend for themselves
Giroux 3 McMaster University, Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies
(Henry A, Pedagogies of Difference, Race, and Representation: Film as a Site of Translation and Politics
Pedagogies of Difference: Rethinking Education for Social Change, edited by Peter Pericles Trifonas, pg.
95-96)
As neoliberalism has
Any attempt to address Baby Boy as a form of public pedagogy would have to analyze the largely privatized and individualized analysis that shapes this film and how it resonates with the ongoing privatization and depoliticization of the public sphere.
gained momentum since the 1980s, one of its distinguishing features has been an assault on all those public spheres that are not regulated by the
language of the market. Under the onslaught of neoliberal ideology and its turn toward free market as the basis for human interaction,
there is an attempt to alter radically the very vocabulary we use in describing and appraising human interest, action, and behavior. Individuals are now defined largely as consumers, and self-interest appears
to be the only factor capable of motivating people. Public spaces are increasingly displaced by commercial interests, and private utopias become the only way of understanding the meaning of the good life. It gets worse. As
public life is emptied of its own separate concerns -importance of public goods, civic virtue, public debate, collective
agency, and social provisions for the marginalized-it becomes increasingly more difficult to translate concerns into private
public considerations. The Darwinian world of universal struggle pits individuals against each other while suggesting
that the misfortunes and problems of others represent both a weakness of character and a social liability.
Within such a system, the state gives up its obligations to provide collective safety nets for people and the ideology of
going it alone furthers the myth that all social problems are the result of individual choices.
Unfortunately, Baby Boy not only refuses to challenge the myth of individual motivation and pathology as the source of unemployment, violence, welfare
dependency, bad housing, inadequate schools, and crumbling infrastructures, it actually reinforces this well rehearsed stable of conservative ideology. It does so by
suggesting that collective problems can only be addressed as tales of individual survival , coming of age stories
that chronicle either selfishness, laziness, and lack of maturity or individual perseverance. By suggesting that Jody 's life is colonized by the private, cut off from
larger social, economic, and political issues, Baby Boy both renders hope private and suggests that communities in struggle can only share or be organized around the most private of intimacies, removed in
large part from the capacity to struggle over broader issues. Dependency in this film is a dirty word, and seems to ignore the ways in which it resonates with right wing attacks on the welfare state and the alleged
perils of big government. Granted, Baby Boy is supposedly about the refusal of immature African-American youth to grow up, but the film 's attack on dependency is so one-sided that it reinforces the myth that social safety nets simply weaken character, and it
supports this ideology, in part, by refusing to acknowledge how dependency on the welfare state has worked for those millions for whom it has "made all the difference between wretched
poverty and a decent life."41 Similarly, if Jody 's dreams are limited to the demands of the traditional family structure and the successes associated with the market ideology, there
is no room in Baby Boy to
recognize democracy, not the market, as a force of dissent and a relentless critique of institutions, as a source of
civic engagement, or as a discourse for expanding and deepening the possibilities of critical citizenship and social transformation. In the
end, Baby Boy fails to offer a space for translating how the private and public mutually inform each other; consequently, it reinforces rather than ruptures those
racially oppressive trends in American society that disfigure the possibility of racial justice, democratic politics, and responsible citizenship.
Atrophying public spheres leads to bio political control through apocalyptic

neoliberal ideology we must focus on every day violence
Henry Giroux 14, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and
Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University, Protesting
Youth in an Age of Neoliberal Savagery, www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/21/protesting-youth-in-an-age-
of-neoliberal-savagery/
Fred Jameson has argued that that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. He
goes on to say that We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world (Jameson 2003). One way of
understanding Jamesons comment is that within
the ideological and affective spaces in which the neoliberal subject is
produced and market-driven ideologies are normalized, there are new waves of resistance, especially among
young people, who are insisting that casino capitalism is driven by a kind of mad violence and form of self-
sabotage, and that if it does not come to an end, what we will experience, in all probability, is the destruction of human
life and the planet itself. Certainly, more recent scientific reports on the threat of ecological disaster from
researchers at the University of Washington, NASA, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
reinforce this dystopian possibility. [1]
neoliberalism is part of a broader economic and political project of restoring class
As the latest stage of predatory capitalism,
power and consolidating the rapid concentration of capital, particularly financial capital (Giroux 2008; 2014). As a political
project, it includes the deregulation of finance, privatization of public services, elimination and curtailment of social welfare programs, open attacks on unions, and
routine violations of labor laws (Yates 2013). As an ideology, it casts all dimensions of life in terms of market rationality, construes profit-making as the arbiter and
essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and upholds the irrational belief that the market can both solve all problems and serve as a
model for structuring all social relations. As a mode of governance, it produces identities, subjects, and ways of life
driven by a survival-of-the fittest ethic, grounded in the idea of the free, possessive individual, and committed to the right of
ruling groups and institutions to exercise power removed from matters of ethics and social costs. As a policy
and political project, it is wedded to the privatization of public services, the dismantling of the connection of private issues and public problems,
the selling off of state functions, liberalization of trade in goods and capital investment , the eradication of government regulation of
financial institutions and corporations, the destruction of the welfare state and unions, and the endless marketization and
commodification of society.
Neoliberalism has put an enormous effort into creating a commanding cultural apparatus and public
pedagogy in which individuals can only view themselves as consumers, embrace freedom as the right to participate in the
market, and supplant issues of social responsibility for an unchecked embrace of individualism and the belief that
all social relation be judged according to how they further ones individual needs and self-interests. Matters of mutual caring, respect, and compassion for the other
have given way to the limiting orbits of privatization and unrestrained self-interest, just as it has become increasingly difficult to translate private troubles into larger
social, economic, and political considerations. As
the democratic public spheres of civil society have atrophied under the
onslaught of neoliberal regimes of austerity, the social contract has been either greatly weakened or replaced by
savage forms of casino capitalism, a culture of fear , and the increasing use of state violence. One consequence is that it
has become more difficult for people to debate and question neoliberal hegemony and the widespread
misery it produces for young people, the poor, middle class, workers, and other segments of society now considered disposable under neoliberal regimes
which are governed by a survival-of-the fittest ethos, largely imposed by the ruling economic and political elite. That they are unable to make their voices heard and
lack any viable representation in the process makes clear the degree to which young people and others are suffering under a democratic deficit, producing what
Chantal Mouffe calls a profound dissatisfaction with a number of existing societies under the reign of neoliberal capitalism (Mouffe 2013:119). This is one reason
why so many youth, along with workers, the unemployed, and students, have been taking to the streets in Greece, Mexico, Egypt, the United States, and England.
Self-defense doctrines are nonsensical because they devolve into a race for weapons
with higher damage coefficients gun control is the most effective protection.
Boylan 12: [Michael Boylan, professor and chairperson of philosophy at Marymount University, The Weapons Continuum, New York
Times, 12/18/2012] VM
With firearms, the weapon damage coefficient makes a jump in kind. Death and permanent injury
rates are significantly higher. When the firearms are rapid-fire automatic weapons (like assault weapons) not only does the rate get even higher but
so does the collateral damage (more people killed or injured aside from the intended victim). This trend continues with rocket-propelled grenade launchers. No longer
is one able to contain the target to a single person, but the target will almost by necessity include a score or more of victims (and considerably more property damage).
Next are anti-aircraft hand-held devices, and finally, if one continues on the weapons continuum there is the nuclear bomb. Depending upon where it is detonated it
could kill as many as 6 million people, in one of the worlds most populous cities. Weapons
exist on a continuum. Some weapons
advocates seem intent on moving along the continuum in order to possess weapons of higher and
higher damage coefficient. Their rationale is that the bad guys will have more powerful weapons
and so must I in order to defend myself. The logical end of such a scenario is the destruction of humankind.
Since no rational person wants that, everyone must, upon pain of logical contradiction of what it
means to be human (an agent seeking purposeful action to achieve what he thinks is good), agree that there must be weapons
control somewhere on the continuum. Weapons control is a given. No one can logically claim that everyone should be able
to possess nuclear weapons. Thus everyone must agree to the concept of weapons control somewhere on the continuum. This point is logically necessary. The only
question is where on the continuum of weapons do we begin banning weapons? And though, as we see in the case of state nuclear proliferation, the fact that rogue
countries may develop nuclear weapons does not deter us from trying to stop each new potential member in the ultimate annihilation club. Among citizens of any
country, the
fact that weapons bans are hard to enforce is not an argument against trying to enforce
them. Moral oughts (in a deontological sense) are not determined by what is easy but by what is right
FW
AT: Ideal Theory
Starting ethics from an ideal vision of the world leaves the oppressed behind -
a. inequalities that exist in the squo do not go remedied you ignore a history of
injustice and cast it into a new system because systems like sexism give men
advantages that you dont correct
b. you shift the goal posts my framework allows for incremental change when you
reset what good means we know that mass inequality is bad and jumping to a new
system erases the progress we can make until then
c. you create ideological dogmas where we dont act in the squo unless it fits inside
your world actively cedes more ground to the oppressor
AT: Util
Giroux AT Extinction
ADV Extensions
AT: Substitution Suicide
Wintemute et al 99 DC is the plan it solves
No substitution more ev
Keith 05 Hawton, Keith. "Restriction of access to methods of suicide as a means of suicide prevention."
Prevention and treatment of suicidal behaviour from Science to practice (2005): 279-291.
Several studies from North America and other countries have addressed the question of whether
reducing firearm availability influences suicide rates. Most have produced evidence that altered
availability of firearms does result in reduced rates of suicide. Thus, following adoption of a law
banning the purchase, sale, transfer, or possession of handguns by civilians in the District of Columbia in
the USA in 1976, accompanied by introduction of registration of firearms, fitness to purchase, and gun
safety standards, there was a decline in the rate of suicide by firearms of 23%, with no evidence of
substitution of method. No change in suicide rates occurred in the surrounding counties of
Maryland and Virginia, where firearm legislation had not changed (Loftin et al. 1991).
Times, 12/18/2012] VM
Weapons exist on a continuum. Some weapons
could kill as many as 6 million people, in one of the worlds most populous cities.
country, the
AT: Substitution DVR
Extend everytown specific to US 11x more likely
Everytown 14 bracketed for language: [Everytown for Gun Safety, GUNS AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN:
America's Uniquely Lethal Domestic Violence Problem, 6/16/14]
Women in the United States are eleven times more likely to be murdered with guns than women in
other high-income countries.2
No shift to long guns

Dixon 93 Nicholas Dixon (associate professor of philosophy, Alma College). Why We Should Ban
Handguns In The United States. Saint Louis University
Law Review. 1993. [Premier, Premier Debate Today, Sign-Up Now]
Another reason to doubt that long guns would be used in great numbers to replace handguns in robberies,
assaults, and homicides is that long guns are obviously much more difficult to conceal. A potential
mugger roaming the streets wielding a long gun will cause everyone in sight to flee, and is likely to be
quickly arrested when alarmed people call the police. Similarly, a bank robber carrying a long gun will be
immediately detected by security guards, alarm systems will be triggered, and the chances of a successful
robbery greatly diminished. Handguns are obviously much more convenient for the commission of such
crimes. Kates and Benenson point out that most homicides occur in the home, where concealability is
"irrelevant." 95 However, concealability would seem to be an important factor even in the home.
Since the victim may well be unaware that the killer is carrying a concealed weapon, the "surprise
factor" which is peculiar to handguns can still apply even in the home. In contrast, people can hardly be
unaware that the person they are with is carrying a shotgun or rifle. Moreover, in any argument or
domestic quarrel, regardless of whether the potential victim knows that the assaulter is carrying a
handgun, the ease of pulling out the gun and shooting makes such arguments more likely to spill
over into murder. In contrast, by the time the assaulter has gone into another room to retrieve their
long gun and loaded it, the potential victim has crucial seconds in which to escape. Another reason
that the concealability of handguns is not a good reason for a handgun-only ban is proposed by Hardy and
Kates in their discussion of the impact of handgun control on robberies. They point out that "[t]he
difference between a long gun and a handgun is ten minutes and a hacksaw."' Even robberies, then, would
not be diminished by a handgun ban. However, this contention runs directly counter to the evidence
collected by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms' Project Identification. Seventy-one percent,
or 7,538, of the handguns submitted for tracing, had a barrel length of 3 inches or less. Sixty-one
percent, or 6,476, had a caliber of .32 or less. Since both of these factors relate to the size of the weapon,
these figures indicate that concealability is an overriding factor in selecting a handgun for use in
crime. 7 Sawed-off shotguns will be much longer and much bulkier than any of these short and small-
caliber handguns, especially "Saturday Night Specials," which combine a caliber of .32 or less with a
barrel length of three inches or less, comprised 44% of all the weapons successfully traced, and fit into the
palm of an average sized hand. We may conclude, then, that because of the difficulty of concealment,
neither long guns nor sawed-off versions of the same are likely to be used in great numbers to replace
handguns in the commission of crimes. The difficulty of concealment factor will outweigh the greater
lethalness of long gun shots. Consequently, a ban on handguns will indeed result in a decrease in
firearms-related homicide and other violent crimes. Since firearms are the most lethal weapons, and they
were used in 64.1% of homicides in the United States in 1990,98 such a ban is, therefore, likely to result
in a reduction in the overall murder rate.'
A2: Race K
A2 State Bad
First, its precisely because the law is such a powerful tool for racial oppression that
we must radically re-deploy it towards emancipatory objectives
Mills 9, Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern (Charles, Spring, Creolizing
Rousseau, CLR James, Vol 15, No. 1)
Few lines in the anti-colonial and anti-racist traditions of the last few decades or so have been as often quoted as
Audre Lorde's (1984) celebrated dictum: "The master's tools can never be used to dismantle the master's house ."
The reason for its popularity is obvious: it sums up so well, in such a neat epigrammatical form, a
seemingly radical and uncompromising metatheoretical position. But with all due respect to my late
fellow Caribbean- American, the multiple oppressions she had to suffer in the racist, sexist, and
heterosexist United States, and her courage in resisting her subordination, affirming her identity, and
making such an invaluable contribution to the distinctive feminism of women of color, this celebrated
dictum is just false . It's not itself pretending to be an argument, of courseit's just an assertion. But if
one does try to come up with a (good) argument for its truth, one quickly finds oneself floundering. Lorde
is not saying: "The masters tools sometimes can, and sometimes cannot, be used to dismantle the masters
house." Such a qualification, while having the happy virtue of making the claim true, would have the
unhappy vice of reducing it to banalitynot what one wants in a good aphorism or epigram. Moreover, it
would be a banality that nullifies its impact, since, of course, it gets its force precisely from its implicit
uncompromisingness: "The master's tools can never be used to dismantle the master's house." But only a
few seconds' thoughtmore than most of its reciters have apparently ever given to itshould be
sufficient to demonstrate the obvious falseness of this claim. Take it, to begin with, at the most literal level,
since if an aphorism is untrue in the concrete it is hardly any more likely to be true at the abstract level
meant to be figured and represented by the concrete. Imagine we're a group of escaped slaves who have begun
by dismantling the master (presumably using our own tools) and now wish to move on to his house. Hunting around
the plantation, we come across a tool-shed of hammers, pickaxes, saws, barrels of gunpowder, and so forth. Cannot
we take these tools andhammering, digging, sawing in half, blowing updemolish the master's house? Of course
we canyou just watch. So the moment one examines the maxim, it falls apart. Only if it could plausibly be
demonstrated that there is something intrinsic in the tool itself that prohibits any such emancipatory use of it would
the dictum be true. But obviously there will be many tools, like hammers, which can be used for a wide variety of
ends, so that even if the master has used them, inter alia, to build his plantation mansion (with our forced labor, of
course), this does not mean that we cannot use them for different purposes once he is no longer with us.
Appropriating the master's toolsafter all, we figure he owes us a lot of back paywe head out West,
where we construct freedmen's towns with them. Who will refuse to move into these houses because they
were built with the master's tools? Consider now the abstract level of conceptual tools and theoretical
frameworks that the material tools are supposed to represent. I suggest that Lorde's dictum is no truer here. Some
tools, such as racism, will be intrinsically oppressive, so that one should be dubious aboutto cite a
famous exampleJean-Paul Sartre's claim in "Black Orpheus" that an "antiracist racism" is possible. But
liberalism and contract theory, I would claim, are different. Admittedly, liberalism and contractarianism have
historically been racializedthis was the whole burden of The Racial Contract. But the crucial disanalogy
as "tools" between racism on the one hand, and liberalism and contractarianism, on the other hand, is that
once you purge racism of its scientific errors and moral viciousness there is nothing left:, while for
liberalism and contractarianism, this is not the case. Racism as an ideology about the natural
differentiation of humanity into discrete, hierarchicallyordered biological groups, or racism as moral
disregard for people because of their race, collapses into nothingness once it is realized that not only are
the groups historically taken to be races not in a hierarchy, but that in fact they do not even exist as
discrete biological entities in the first place, and that raciallybased disregard for people is morally
unconscionable. But liberalism and contractarianism as descriptive and normative claims about how we should
think of the formation of society and the rights that morally equal humans should have within that society can
survive the removal of racist conceptions of who should be counted as fully human and fully equal. The latter
"tools," unlike the former, have other dimensions beside the goal of subordination, and so can be reclaimed. An
anti-contractarian contractarianism is possible in a way that an anti-racist racism is not. Within the
classical Western tradition, I would contend, Rousseau provides us with a paradigm of how such a
reclamation can be achieved. Rousseau is unique among the "big four" contract theorists (Hobbes,
Locke, Rousseau, Kant) in that he is the only one of them to describe two contracts. In the words of
Patrick Riley, he is both "the purest social contract theorist of the eighteenth century (and simultaneously
the deepest critic of contractarianism after Hume)." This may seem to be a contradiction in his theoretical
position, but it is not. His criticism is directed against the existing contract its standard formulation,
and the actual nature of the societies based on it while his endorsement is of an ideal contract
radically reconceptualized, and serving as the foundation of a dramatically new kind of social order.
Third calling upon the state to change undermines its legitimacy

Saul Newman 10, Reader in Political Theory at Goldsmiths, U of London, Theory & Event Volume 13,
Issue 2
There are two aspects that I would like to address here. Firstly, thenotion of demand: making certain demands on the state say
for higher wages, equal rights for excluded groups, to not go to war, or an end to draconian policing is one of the basic strategies of social
movements and radical groups. Making such demands does not necessarily mean working within the state
or reaffirming its legitimacy . On the contrary, demands are made from a position outside the political
order, and they often exceed the question of the implementation of this or that specific
measure. They implicitly call into question the legitimacy and even the sovereignty of the state by
highlighting fundamental inconsistencies between, for instance, a formal constitutional order which guarantees
certain rights and equalities, and state practices which in reality violate and deny them.
Fourth, the aff is a revolutionary reformits a concrete expression of systemic critique

that enables broader change down the road
Wray 14, International Socialist Group, The case for revolutionary reforms,
http://internationalsocialist.org.uk/index.php/2014/04/the-case-for-revolutionary-reforms/
We need revolutionary change. Theres no two ways about it if the exploitation of labour by capital continues to be the central dynamic driving
economic development, we are headed for human and environmental catastrophe. But as Ive discussed in the previous five parts of this series, getting from
where we are to a revolutionary transformation that overthrows the dominant property relations of the capitalist economy and
is not as simple as declaring our desire for it to be
replaces them with social relations based on democratic control of the worlds resources
so. I saw a petition on change.org the other day proposing the overthrow of capitalism. If one million people signed that
petition and one million people signed a further petition to introduce full collective bargaining rights for trade-unions in
the UK, which one would move us closer to the overthrow of capitalism? I wager the latter. Whilst having an end goal
in sight is important, most people dont change their thinking about the world based on bold visions of what could be done
at some point in the future: they change their ideas based on evidence from their material lives which points to the inadequacy or irrationality of the status quo. In
other words, we need to have ideas that build upon peoples lived experience of capitalism, and since that it is within the framework of a representative democracy
system, we need ideas based around proposals for reforms. At the same time those reforms have to help rather than hinder a
move to more revolutionary transformation that challenges the very core of the capitalist system. The dialectic of reform and
revolution What we need, therefore, is a strategy of revolutionary reforms. Such a notion would appear as a contradiction in terms to many
who identify as reformists or revolutionaries and see the two as dichotomous, but there is no reason why this should be the case.
Indeed, history has shown that revolutionary transformations have always happened as a dialectical interaction between rapid,
revolutionary movements and more institutional, reform-based challenges . Even the revolutionary part of that dialectic has
always been motivated by the immediate needs of the participants involved land, bread and peace being the first half of the slogan of the Russian Revolution.
What does a strategy of revolutionary reforms entail? Ed Rooksby explains that it is a political strategy that builds towards
revolutionary change by using reforms to push up against the limits of the logic of capitalism in practice : At
first these feasible objectives will be limited to reforms within capitalismor at least to measures which, from the
standpoint of a more or less reformist working class consciousness, appear to be legitimate and achievable within the system, but which
may actually run counter to the logic of capitalism and start to push up against its limits. As the working class
engages in struggle, however, the anti-capitalist implications of its needs and aspirations are gradually revealed. At the
same time, through its experience of struggle for reform, the working class learns about its capacity for self-management,
initiative and collective decision and can have a foretaste of what emancipation means. In this way struggle for
reform helps prepare the class psychologically, ideologically and materially for revolution . The late Daniel Bensaid
expressed this argument through the lens of the history of the socialist movement: In reality all sides in the controversy agree on the fundamental
points inspired by The Coming Catastrophe (Lenins pamphlet of the summer of 1917) and the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International (inspired by
Trotsky in 1937): the

need for transitional demands , the politics of alliances (the united front), the logic of hegemony and on the
dialectic (not antinomy) between reform and revolution. We are therefore against the idea of separating an (anti-neoliberal) minimum
programme and an (anti-capitalist) maximum programme. We remain convinced that a consistent anti-neoliberalism leads to anti-capitalism and that the two are
interlinked by the dynamic of struggle. So revolutionary
reforms means a policy agenda that, as Alberto Toscano has put it, at one and
the same time make concrete gains within capitalism which permits further movement against capitalism . The Italian
marxist Antonio Gramsci described this approach as a war of positon.
The plan is a bulwark that uses the law against itself

Delgado 98 (Richard, Jean N. Lindsley Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, Is
American Law Inherently Racist, Debate w/ Prof. Farber, Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository,
http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1211&context=facpubs)
AUDIENCE: If we accept the premise that American law is inherently racist, what can be done
about it? Where do we start? And related to that, how can an inherently racist law be made unracist,
or are we just doomed to a perpetual battle to decrease the level of racism in our laws? PROFESSOR
DELGADO: No. I don't think that it is a dispiriting or an overly pessimistic view , if one accepts the
position-as I do, that American law is recurrently, inherently racist any more than, it is enervating
to accept the proposition that the human body, let's say, is inherently frail. From which it follows
then that one ought to take reasonable measures. One ought to wear safety belts, one ought to
vaccinate children, and one does not simply give up from the recognition that something is inherently
a difficulty or a problem. Vigilance is what is called for, not giving up . So no, I do not take the
position that the inherent racism that seems to inflict our society requires any sort of surrender.
Quite the contrary, it requires all of our efforts if we are to be the society that we can be and that we
are in other respects. I will address this point later in my talk.
A2 Curry
Unless their theory is able to explain literally EVERYTHING in the world, their form of ethics ends
up reifying inside-outside binaries and reproducing anti-black violence only rigorous explanatory
critique can undermine the basis for anti-black moralism thats Jones consequentialism is key to
debates about race and blackness.
Bracey 06 (Sept. 2006, Christopher, Associate Professor of Law and African and African American
Studies, Wash U-St. Louis, Southern California Law Review, 79 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1231, p. 1318)
Second, reducing conversation on race matters to an ideological contest allows opponents to elide
inquiry into whether the results of a particular preference policy are desirable. Policy positions masquerading
as principled ideological stances create the impression that a racial policy is not simply a choice among
available alternatives, but the embodiment of some higher moral principle. Thus, the "principle"
becomes an end in itself, without reference to outcomes . Consider the prevailing view of colorblindness in
constitutional discourse. Colorblindness has come to be understood as the embodiment of what is morally
just, independent of its actual effect upon the lives of racial minorities. This explains Justice
Thomas's belief in the "moral and constitutional equivalence" between Jim Crow laws and race preferences, and his tragic assertion that "Government
cannot make us equal [but] can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law." 281 For Thomas, there is no meaningful difference between laws
Critics may point out that
designed to entrench racial subordination and those designed to alleviate conditions of oppression.
colorblindness in practice has the effect of entrenching existing racial disparities in health, wealth,
and society. But in framing the debate in purely ideological terms, opponents are able to avoid the
contentious issue of outcomes and make viability determinations based exclusively on whether racially
progressive measures exude fidelity to the ideological principle of colorblindness. Meaningful policy debate is replaced by
ideological exchange , which further exacerbates hostilities and deepens the cycle of resentment .
A2 Abolition Alt
Is crime non-existent in your world? Can some things be banned from being
obtained This has to be a k about discriminatory enforcement which.
Short term efforts to reduce incarceration is an effective combination of critique,
action, and goals that holds reform and abolition in creative tension in order to
maintain the advantages of bothwe arent reformism, but non-reformist reforms
towards abolition
Berger 13 [2013, Dan Berger is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Bothell, Social Movements and Mass Incarceration: What is To Be
Done?, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 15, Issue 1-2, 2013, pages 3-18]
The strategy of decarceration combines radical critique, direct action, and tangible goals for reducing
the reach of the carceral state. It is a coalitional strategy that works to shrink the prison system
through a combination of pragmatic demands and far-reaching, open-ended critique . It is reform in
pursuit of abolition . Indeed, decarceration allows a strategic launch pad for the politics of abolition,
providing what has been an exciting but abstract framework with a course of action . 32 Rather than
juxtapose pragmatism and radicalism, as has so often happened in the realm of radical activism, the strategy of
decarceration seeks to hold them in creative tension . It is a strategy in the best tradition of the black
freedom struggle. It is a strategy that seeks to take advantage of political conditions without
sacrificing its political vision . Today we are in a moment where it is possible, in the words of an organizer whose work
successfully closed Illinois's infamous supermax prison Tamms in January 2013, to confront prisons as both an economic and a
moral necessity. 33 Prisons bring together diverse forms of oppression across race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship status, HIV status and beyond.
The movements against them, therefore, will need to bring together diverse communities of resistance.
They will need to unite people across a range of issues, identities, and sectors. That is the coalition underlying groups such as Californians United for a Responsible
Budget (CURB), the Nation Inside initiative, and Decarcerate PA. The fight against prisons is both a targeted campaign and a
broad-based struggle for social justice. These movements must include the leadership by those directly affected while at the same work to
understand that prisons affect us all. This message is the legacy of prison rebellions from Attica in 1971 to Pelican Bay in 2012. The
challenge is to
maintain the aspirational elements of that message while at the same time translating it into a political
program. Decarceration, therefore, works not only to shrink the prison system but to expand community
cohesion and maximize what can only be called freedom . Political repression and mass incarceration
are joined at the hip. The struggles against austerity, carcerality, and social oppression, the
struggles for restorative and transformative justice, for grassroots empowerment and social justice
must be equally interconnected. For it is only when the movement against prisons is as interwoven in
the social fabric of popular resistance as the expansion of prisons has been stitched into the wider
framework of society that we might hope to supplant the carceral state. There are many obstacles on the path toward
decarceration; the existence of a strategy hardly guarantees its success. Until now, I have focused largely on the challenges internal to the movement, but there are
even taller hurdles to jump in encountering (much less transforming) the deeply entrenched carceral state. Perhaps the biggest challenge, paradoxically, comes from
the growing consensus, rooted in the collective fiscal troubles of individual states, that there is a need for prison reform. In that context, a range of politicians, think
tanks, and nonprofit organizationsfrom Right on Crime to the Council on State Governments and the Pew Charitable Trustshave offered a spate of neoliberal
reforms that trumpet free market solutions, privatization, or shifting the emphasis away from prisons but still within the power of the carceral state. Examples include
the Justice Reinvestment processes utilized by states such as Texas and Pennsylvania that have called for greater funding to police and conservative victim's rights
neoliberal reforms can also be found in the
advocates while leaving untouched some of the worst elements of excessive punishment. These
sudden burst of attention paid to reentry services that are not community-led and may be
operated by private, conservative entities. 34 Perhaps the grandest example can be found in California, where a Supreme Court ruling that
overcrowding in the state's prisons constituted cruel and unusual punishment has been met with a proposal for realignment, that shifts the burden from state prisons
to county jails. 35 A combination of institutional intransigence and ideological commitment to punish makes the road ahead steep. Even
as many states
move to shrink their prison populations, they have done so in ways that have left in place the
deepest markings of the carceral state, such as the use of life sentences and solitary confinement,
and the criminalization of immigrants. Social movements will need to confront the underlying
ideologies that hold that there is an acceptable level of widespread imprisonment , that there is a specter of
villainy out therebe they illegal immigrants, cop killers, sex criminalswaiting in the wings to destroy the American way
of life. 36 There is a risk, inherent in the sordid history of prison reform, that the current reform
impulse will be bifurcated along poorly defined notions of deservingness that will continue to
uphold the carceral logic that separates good people from bad people and which decides that
no fate is too harsh for those deemed unworthy of social inclusion. This, then, is a movement that
needs to make nuanced yet straightforward arguments that take seriously questions of accountability
while showing that more cops and more (whether bigger or smaller) cages only takes us further from that goal. 37
At stake is the kind of world we want to live in, and the terms could not be more clear: the choice , to
paraphrase Martin Luther King, is either carceral chaos or liberatory community. The framework of communityas expressed
Decarcerate PA slogan build communities not prisons and the CURB budget for humanity campaignallows for a robust imagination of the institutions and
mechanisms that foster community versus those that weaken it. It focuses our attention on activities, slogans, programs, and demands that maximize communities. In
short, it allows for unity. If
the state wants to crush dissent through isolation, our movements must rely on
togetherness to win. Solidarity is the difference between life and death. State repression expands in
the absence of solidarity . Solidarity is a lifeline against the logic of criminalization and its
devastating consequences. For the most successful challenges to imprisonment come from
intergenerational movements: movements where people raise each other's consciousness and raise
each other's children, movements that fight for the future because they know their history . Here, in
this pragmatic but militant radicalism, is a chance to end mass incarceration and begin the process of
shrinking the carceral state out of existence.
Complete rejection of institutional logic of civil society crushes anti-white

supremacy politics.
Kimberle CRENSHAW Law @ UCLA 88 [RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT:
TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW 101 Harv. L. Rev.
1331 L/N]
Questioning the Transformative View: Some Doubts About Trashing The Critics' product is of limited utility to Blacks in its present form. The implications for Blacks
of trashing liberal legal ideology are troubling, even though it may be proper to assail belief structures that obscure liberating possibilities. Trashing legal ideology
seems to tell us repeatedly what has already been established -- that legal discourse is unstable and relatively indeterminate. Furthermore,
trashing offers
no idea of how to avoid the negative consequences of engaging in reformist discourse or how to work
around such consequences. Even if we imagine the wrong world when we think in terms of legal
discourse, we must nevertheless exist in a present world where legal protection has at times been a
blessing -- albeit a mixed one. The fundamental problem is that, although Critics criticize law because it functions
to legitimate existing institutional arrangements, it is precisely this legitimating function that has
made law receptive to certain demands in this area. The Critical emphasis on deconstruction as the vehicle for
liberation leads to the conclusion that engaging in legal discourse should be avoided because it
reinforces not only the discourse itself but also the society and the world that it embodies. Yet Critics offer little
beyond this observation. Their focus on delegitimating rights rhetoric seems to suggest that, once rights rhetoric has been
discarded, there exists a more productive strategy for change, one which does not reinforce existing
patterns of domination. Unfortunately, no such strategy has yet been articulated , and it is difficult to imagine
that racial minorities will ever be able to discover one. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward point out in their [*1367]
excellent account of the civil rights movement, popular struggles are a reflection of institutionally determined logic
and a challenge to that logic. 137 People can only demand change in ways that reflect the logic of the
institutions that they are challenging . 138 Demands for change that do not reflect the institutional
logic -- that is, demands that do not engage and subsequently reinforce the dominant ideology -- will
probably be ineffective. 139 The possibility for ideological change is created through the very process of legitimation, which is triggered by crisis.
Powerless people can sometimes trigger such a crisis by challenging an institution internally, that is,
by using its own logic against it. 140 Such crisis occurs when powerless people force open and
politicize a contradiction between the dominant ideology and their reality. The political consequences [*1368] of
maintaining the contradictions may sometimes force an adjustment -- an attempt to close the gap or to make things appear fair. 141 Yet, because the adjustment is
triggered by the political consequences of the contradiction, circumstances will be adjusted only to the extent necessary to close the apparent contradiction. This
approach to understanding legitimation and change is applicable to the civil rights movement. Because Blacks were
challenging their exclusion from political society, the only claims that were likely to achieve recognition were those that reflected American society's institutional
logic: legal rights ideology. Articulating their formal demands through legal rights ideology, civil rights protestors exposed a series of contradictions -- the most
important being the promised privileges of American citizenship and the practice of absolute racial subordination. Rather than using the
contradictions to suggest that American citizenship was itself illegitimate or false, civil rights
protestors proceeded as if American citizenship were real, and demanded to exercise the rights
that citizenship entailed. By seeking to restructure reality to reflect American mythology, Blacks
relied upon and ultimately benefited from politically inspired efforts to resolve the contradictions by granting
formal rights. Although it is the need to maintain legitimacy that presents powerless groups with the opportunity to wrest concessions from the dominant order, it
is the very accomplishment of legitimacy that forecloses greater possibilities. In sum, the potential for change is both created and limited by legitimation.
Working Parts
Suicide Solvency
Handgun Ban Solves
UK proves a handgun solves in the long run. Faiola 13:
Anthony Faiola. "After shooting tragedies, Britain went after guns." Washington Post. February 1, 2013.
After Britains sweeping handgun ban was imposed in 1997, for instance, tens of thousands of
weapons were collected from legal owners in exchange for fair market value, cutting off supplies of
stolen handguns that ended up in criminal hands and largely forbidding their sale by gun dealers in
Britain. Nevertheless, statistics show that gun violence in Britain increased for the next several years. But
starting in 2005 and following years of anti-gun sweeps by police forces in British cities that made
illegal guns far less accessible gun violence began to ebb. In 2011, England and Wales recorded
7,024 offenses involving firearms, down 37 percent from their peak in 2005. Given that British crime
statistics also count fake guns as firearms, criminologists say the number of violent crimes involving
real guns is likely significantly lower. One thing that is now certain is that its much more difficult to get
a gun in this country, said Jack Straw, Britains former cabinet minister in charge of home affairs and
one of the chief architects of the 1997 Firearms Act.
Only gun control measures can minimize preventable suicide deaths the plan is the
best available option.
HSPS 08: [Harvard School of Public Health, Guns and suicide: A fatal link, Spring 2008]
In the United States, suicides outnumber homicides almost two to one. Perhaps the real tragedy
behind suicide deathsabout 30,000 a year, one for every 45 attemptsis that so many could be
prevented. Research shows that whether attempters live or die depends in large part on the ready availability
of highly lethal means, especially firearms. A study by the Harvard School of Public Health of all 50
U.S. states reveals a powerful link between rates of firearm ownership and suicides. Based on a survey of American households conducted in 2002, HSPH Assistant Professor of
Health Policy and Management Matthew Miller, Research Associate Deborah Azrael, and colleagues at the Schools Injury Control Research Center (ICRC), found that in states
where guns were prevalentas in Wyoming, where 63 percent of households reported owning gunsrates of suicide were higher. The
inverse was also true: where gun ownership was less common, suicide rates were also lower. The lesson?
Many lives would likely be saved if people disposed of their firearms, kept them locked away, or stored them outside the home.
Says HSPH Professor of Health Policy David Hemenway, the ICRCs director: Studies show that most attempters act on impulse, in
moments of panic or despair. Once the acute feelings ease, 90 percent do not go on to die by
suicide. But few can survive a gun blast. Thats why the ICRCs Catherine Barber has launched Means Matter, a campaign that asks the public to help
prevent suicide deaths by adopting practices and policies that keep guns out of the hands of vulnerable adults and children. For details, visit www.meansmatter.org.
Fewer guns mean fewer suicides. Briggs and Tabarrok 13:
Justin Briggs and Alex Tabarrok (econ prof at George Mason). "It's simple: fewer guns, fewer suicides."
Slate. December 12, 2013.
So in a new paper published in the International Review of Law and Economics, we studied the
relationship between guns and suicide in the U.S. from 2000 to 2009. Using five measures of gun
ownership and controlling for other factors associated with suicide, such as mental illness, we
consistently found that each 1 percentage-point increase in household gun ownership rates leads to
between 0.5 and 0.9 percent more suicides. Or, to put it the other way, a percentage-point decrease in
household gun ownership leads to between 0.5 and 0.9 percent fewer suicides.
And, people won't just use other means. Matthews 15:
Dylan Matthews. "Most gun deaths are suicides, not homicides. That's a strong case for gun control."
Vox. June 3, 2015.
There's a popular myth that suicidal people will find a way to kill themselves no matter what, and that
closing off one method (like guns) will just lead to an increase in suicides through other methods (like
hanging or overdoses). But most suicides aren't committed by determined people who can't be talked out
of it. They're impulsive actions that can usually be prevented by small barriers. Many survivors say
they deliberated less than a day, and sometimes for only a matter of minutes, before making a suicide
attempt. Ken Baldwin, who survived a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, once told the New Yorker's Tad
Friend that as he was falling, he "instantly realized that everything in my life that Id thought was
unfixable was totally fixable except for having just jumped." Baldwin's change of heart isn't too
unusual. Ninety percent or so of people who've survived suicide attempts do not end up dying by
suicide. So blocking off particularly lethal suicide methods ones where attempts almost always lead
to death saves life. Guns are an extremely lethal suicide method. The Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention found that in 2001, 85 percent of suicide attempts involving guns resulted in death,
significantly above other methods. A study looking at hospital admissions for suicides and suicide
attempts in Illinois found that 96 percent of firearm cases resulted in death, while only 6.7 percent of
cases involving cuts and 6.5 percent of cases involving poisoning did. "In the public-health community,"
Leon Neyfakh wrote in an excellent piece on guns and suicide for the Boston Globe, "researchers have
widely come to regard it as a basic truth that access to a gun makes it more likely that someone who
wants to commit suicide actually manages to do so."
Empirics prove the DC gun ban decreased suicides by handguns
Wintemute et al 99: Garen J. Wintemute ~MD, MPH~, Carrie A Parham ~MS~, James Jay Beaumont
~PhD~, Mona Wright ~MPH~ and Christiana Drake ~PhD~; all of them ~work at the Massachusetts
Medical Society~, "Mortality Among Recent Purchasers of Handguns," The New England Journal of
Medicine, Volume 341, Number 21, November 19, 1999,
Reducing access to firearms within an entire population can prevent suicides by firearm.30-37 Rates of
suicide by firearm correlate very closely, both geographically and temporally, with measures of the
availability of firearms.33,38-40 In cross-sectional studies, stricter controls on access to firearms have
been found to be associated with lower rates of suicide by firearm.33,40,41 In New York City, where
handgun ownership has been strictly regulated since the early 20th century, rates of suicide by firearm are
very low; rates of suicide by other methods vary directly with the availability of those methods.42
Even if bans can't be perfectly enforced, they're still better than mere gun control. McMahan 12:
Jeff McMahan 12 ~White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and taught
previously at Rutgers University and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign~, "Why Gun 'Control'
Is Not Enough," The New York Times, December 19, 2012,
They will next argue that even if there were a legal prohibition, it could not be enforced with anything
approaching complete effectiveness. This is true. As long as some people somewhere have guns, some
people here can get them. Similarly, the legal prohibition of murder cannot eliminate murder. But the
prohibition of murder is more effective than a policy of murder control would be. Guns are not like
alcohol and drugs, both of which we have tried unsuccessfully to prohibit. Many people have an
intense desire for alcohol or drugs that is independent of what other people may do. But the need for a
gun for self-defense depends on whether other people have them and how effective the protection and
deterrence provided by the state are. Thus, in other Western countries in which there are fewer guns,
there are correspondingly fewer instances in which people need guns for effective self-defense.
Framework
A2: F/w Debater
differences.
transgressions of justice] Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century. Pg 4-5 ghs//VA
Finally, to
2] Abstract theories of justice that strive towards an ideal ignore systems of

oppression - instead we should adopt non-ideal theories that recognize current
injustice. --- That requires positive obligations
Mills, C. W. (2009), Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 47: 161184
Now how can this ideala society not merely without a past history of racism but without races themselvesserve
to adjudicate the merits of competing policies aimed at correcting for a long history of white
supremacy manifest in Native American expropriation, African slavery, residential and educational
segregation, large differentials in income and huge differentials in wealth, nonwhite
underrepresentation in high-prestige occupations and overrepresentation in the prison system,
contested national narratives and cultural representations, widespread white evasion and bad faith
on issues of their racial privilege, and a corresponding hostile white backlash against (what remains of)
those mild corrective measures already implemented? Obviously, it cannot. As Thomas Nagel concedes: Ideal theory
enables you to say when a society is unjust, because it falls short of the ideal. But it does not tell you
what to do if, as is almost always the case, you find yourself in an unjust society, and want to
correct that injustice (2003a, 82). Ideal theory represents an unattainable target that would require us
to roll back the clock and start over. So in a sense it is an ideal with little or no practical worth. What is
required is the nonideal (rectificatory) ideal that starts from the reality of these injustices and then seeks
some fair means of correcting for them, recognizing that in most cases the original
prediscrimination situation (even if it can be intelligibly characterized and stipulated) cannot be restored. Trying to rectify systemic
black disadvantage through affirmative action is not the equivalent of not discriminating against blacks, especially when there are no blacks to be discriminated
against. Far from being indispensable to the elaboration of nonideal theory, ideal theory would have been revealed to be largely useless for it. But the situation is
worse than that. As the example just given illustrates, it is not merely a matter of an ideal with problems of operationalization and relevance, but of an ideal likely to
lend itself more readily to retrograde political agendas. If the ideal ideal rather than the rectificatory ideal is to guide us, then a world without races and any kind of
distinctiondrawing by race may seem to be an attractive goal. One takes the ideal to be colorblind nondiscrimination, as appropriate for a society beginning from the
state of nature, and thencompletely ignoring the nonideal history that has given whites a systemic illicit advantage over people of colorconflates together as
discrimination all attempts to draw racial distinctions for public policy goals, no matter what their motivation, on the grounds that this perpetuates race and
invidious differential treatment by race. In the magisterial judgment of Chief Justice John Roberts in the June 2007 Supreme Court decision on the Seattle and
Louisville cases where schools were using race as a factor to maintain diversity, The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the
basis of race,6 a statement achieving the remarkable feat of depicting not merely as true, but as tautologically true, the equating of Jim Crow segregation and the
attempt to remedy Jim Crow tion! What is ideally called for under ideal circumstances is not, or at least is not necessarily, what is ideally called for under nonideal
circumstances. Claiming
that all we need to do is to cease (what is here characterized as) discrimination ignores the
differential advantages and privileges that have accumulated in the white population because of the past history of
discrimination. So the defense in terms of ideal theory is doubly problematic. In the first place, ideal theory was never supposed to be an end in itself, but a means to
improving our handling of nonideal matters, and the fact that Rawls and his disciples and commentators have for the most part stayed in the realm of the ideal
represents an evasion of the imperative of dealing with what were supposed to be the really pressing issues. And in the second place, it is questionable in any case how
So it is not merely that ideal theory has not
useful the ideal ideal in the Rawlsian sense is or ever would have been in assisting this task.
come to the aid of those dealing with nonideal injustice but that it was unlikely to have been of
much help when and if it ever did arrive.

disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory over the other. In Ideal Theory as
constantly emerging and undisclosed beyond the effects we observe) are
totalizable by any one set of theories within an
A2: K debate
differences.
transgressions of justice] Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century.
Finally, to

disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory over the other . In Ideal Theory as
constantly emerging and undisclosed beyond the effects we observe) are totalizable by any one set of theories within an
3] This is key to breaking down the culture of silence.

Pena 09, (Jocelyn Pena, [Attended University of Phoenix and New York University; Senior Manager and Special Assistant at Puerto Rican
Legal Defense and Education Fund PRLDEF], Five Faces of Oppression (adapted from Five Faces of Oppression by Iris Young), Originally
a chapter in Oppression, Privilege, and Resistance edited by Lisa Heldke and Peg OConnor, Published by McGraw Hill in Boston, 2004,
Assignment for Mr. Devins class on Leadership at San Jose, June 15, 2009. FT)
Marginalization is the act of relegating or confining [confines] a group of people to a lower social standing or outer limit or edge of society.
Overall, it is a process of exclusion. Marginalization is in some ways worse than exploitation because society has decided that it cannot or will not use these people even for labor. Most
commonly, people are marginalized based upon race. One prominent example is the Aboriginal communities of Australia that were excluded from society and pushed farther and farther away
from their homelands as cities grew. The marginalization of Aborigines happened when society met the needs of white people and not the needs of the marginalized themselves. Thus,
marginalization is closely linked to the idea of whiteness. In the U.S., most marginalized groups are racially marked. Yet, this racial exclusion also occurs in countries outside the U.S.Blacks or
marginalization is by no means the fate

Indians in Latin America, and Blacks, East Indians, and Eastern Europeans, or North Africans in Europe. Yet,
only of racially marked people. In the [U.S] United States a shamefully large proportion of the population is marginal:
elderly people who are fired from their jobs; young Blacks or Latinos who cannot find their first or second jobs; many single mothers and their children; other people involuntarily unemployed;
many mentally and physically disabled people; and American Native Indians, especially those on reservations. Marginalization expels a whole category[s]
of people from useful participation in social life. As a result, these groups are subjected to severe material deprivation (they dont have access to basic
resources) and even extermination (such as genocide). The idea of powerlessness links to Marxs theory of socialism: some people have power while
others have-not. The powerless are dominated by the ruling class and are situated to take orders and rarely have the right to give them. Some of the fundamental injustices
associated with powerlessness are inhibition to develop ones capacities, lack of decision making power, and exposure to disrespectful treatment because of the lowered status. In the U.S., the
powerless do not participate in basic democratic processes because they feel that they cant or that [it] their participation
wont mean anything. In most cases, it means not voting or participating in any decision making process. However, the deeper forms of
powerlessness are far more insidious. Brazilian educational philosopher Paulo Freire believes that powerlessness is the strongest
form of oppression because it allows people to oppress themselves and others. It is easiest to explain by making a
connection to Harriet Tubman, a famous freed African American runaway slave and abolitionist. Tubman once wrote I would have free
thousands more, if they had known they were slaves. In these words, Tubman conveys that some slaves felt so 3
powerless, thought so little of themselves, and were so indoctrinated by the mindsets of their slave masters that
they didnt realize that they were slaves. In fact, its quite possible some slaves didnt even realize that something was wrong with society and that they were
being treated unjustly. This is an example of powerlessness that creates what Freire calls a Culture of Silence. According to Freire, oppressed
people become so powerless that they do not even talk about their oppression. If they reach this stage of oppression, it
creates a culture wherein it is forbidden to even mention the injustices that are being committed. The oppressed
are silenced. They have no voice and no will. Of course, there are still varying levels of silence. A surface level of silence is when the oppressed know
they are being oppressed but cannot talk about it or voice their suffering or concerns. African American slavery in the U.S. provides a prime example. Slaves were forbidden to talk to one another
about their horrid situations and many lacked the words to communicate their thoughts and feelings. Yet, slaves were extremely resourceful and would find hidden ways to voice themselves. A
They are taught by

deeper level of silencing occurs through indoctrination. At this stage, the oppressed actually believe that they are naturally inferior to the ruling class.
oppressors that their inferiority is normal and a fact of life. They do not know that they have a
voice. In addition, education and literacy are [may be] withheld so as to prevent them from gaining
knowledge about themselves and stop them from finding means to communicate their thoughts and
feelings. According to Freire, one of the main means of indoctrinating the oppressed is to give them negative images of themselves. The oppressed are
dehumanized and taught to believe the negative perceptions as fact. The most dangerous part of this process of indoctrination is
when these negative images are internalized and become a part of the oppressed persons own beliefs. At this point, the oppressed arent silent because they are forced to be; they are silent
The only way to fight against powerlessness and the Culture of Silence is to gain a
because they choose to be.
greater consciousness. Oppressed people throughout history have gained a greater understanding and consciouness of themselves and others through education, literacy, and
self-reflection. It is through the act of using their voice and gaining a critical perspective of their
oppressors that the oppressed are able to free themselves of indoctrination and (eventually) free their bodies from
oppression as well. Freire calls this process of gaining critical consciousness conscientization.
Advantages
Contention 5 is Gun Culture
We need to force the discussion on gun culture in America it silently props up systems of
subjugation based on race, class, and gender.
DEVEGA 15: [CHAUNCEY DEVEGA, His work has been featured by the Alternet, the BBC, the New York Daily News, the Week, the
AP, and The Atlantic Monthly, The plague of angry white men: How racism, gun culture & toxic masculinity are poisoning America, Salon,
7/7/15]
Roofs actions were those of the angry white man on steroids. While his feelings of toxic white
masculinity could have been insulated by the relative privileges of being born into the middle class,
he was instead suckered into a sense of white racial victimology, entitlement and identity politics by
the right-wing media and online racist propaganda. Never did he think to identify the system he venerated, racial patriarchy, as the
source of his own alienation. Instead, like so many other angry young men like him, he bought into it wholeheartedly. Roofs translating this anger into violent action
is (thankfully) a rare event in the United States. But, as sociologist Michael Kimmer detailed in his book Angry White Men, this sense of (white) grievance and
anger is all too common. Guns are central to toxic white masculinity, as well as the broader white
supremacist and conservative politics that Dylann Roof exemplified. In the United States, guns have a deep
historic relationship to the maintenance and enforcement of hierarchies of race, class and gender.
They were a tool for committing mass genocide against First Nations peoples, for example. They
were given to white indentured servants in the 17th century as a way of cementing their identities as
free people who could then be used to oppress and control black slaves and other people of color.
Guns have been a tool for American plutocrats and the 1 percent to control the working classes and the poor. The gun is also a powerful symbol
of masculinity and virility: A recent ad campaign by the manufacturer of the AR-15 rifle featured a
picture of the weapon along with the tag line: Consider your man card reissued. As seen with Dylann Roof
and other mass shooters (a group in which white males are grossly overrepresented) such as Elliot Rodger, Adam Lanza, the Columbine killers and James Holmes,
toxic masculinity (and a sense of aggrieved white male entitlement) is central to their decision to use firearms to commit
acts of mass murder. The corporate news media does not want a sustained discussion of gun violence as a type of public health crisis. The corporate
news media is also unwilling to discuss how domestic terrorism by right-wing white men is now the United States leading threat to public order. Very troublingly,
the corporate news media considers it impolitic to explore how the right-wing echo chamber is
radicalizing and weaponizing its followers. And there most certainly will not be a national
conversation about toxic white masculinity and mass murder in the mainstream news media.
Plan solves a major avenue for the infliction of white racial terror upon black
communities, and gun violence locks in cycles of racist oppression
Peniel '15 (Joseph Peniel, Reporter for Newsweek, "Guns Have Been the Most Dramatic Weapon Used Against African-Americans, but Not
the Most Effective," Newsweek, 6/23, http://www.newsweek.com/guns-have-been-most-dramatic-weapon-used-against-african- americans-not-
most-346101)
African-American veterans returned from World War I with a renewed militancy that helped ignite a New Negro Movement that promoted black political self-determination. New Negroes
flocked to Marcus Garveys Universal Negro Improvement Association, creating businesses, publishing newspapers and preaching a gospel of racial unity whose cultural arm would flower in the
Harlem Renaissance. But whites anti-black violence, often backed by guns, was never far away. Racial segregation in public
Just as guns, many of themincluding those wielded by black
accommodations and the disenfranchisement of black voters was backed by both public policy and popular consensus.
soldiershelped to end slavery and win the Civil War, it would take thousands of gunsthis time
wielded by white supremaciststo enable white Southerners to win the peace. The modern civil
rights era unfolded against this backdrop, where whites used guns and threats of violent reprisals
to ensure a brutally unjust racial order. The movements nonviolent face, personified by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s dream of a beloved community, hid
a long history of armed self-determination within the black community. Malcolm Xs scathing broadsides against white violence
included open advocacy for armed self-defense so that blacks could achieve liberation by any
means necessary, as he often said in speeches during the early 1960s. While most African-Americans avoided taking up arms, some did, including Robert F. Williams, a North
Carolina NAACP activist and author of Negroes With Guns (1962); the Deacons for Defense and Justice; and the Black Panthers. Both Williams and the Deacons offered armed protection
against racist terror for nonviolent civil rights activists in the South. Members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (or SNCC, pronounced snick) encountered an older
The Black Panthers for a time went

generation of Southern blacks who never left their rural homes without carrying a pistol or shotgun for protection.
further, shifting from a self-defensive posture into an open advocacy of revolutionary violence
before being pummeled into submission by the FBI and local authorities through state-sanctioned
violence. Yet the symbolism of black men and women confronting police brutality and racial
violence armed with guns and law books resonates today. Post-civil-rights America has seen an explosion of guns and gun violence that has
disproportionately hurt the African-American community. The flood of guns in racially segregated and impoverished black
neighborhoods has produced catastrophic trauma in inner cities. Black homicide rates dwarf their white counterparts, with most
victims killed by African-Americans, the pro-gun control Violence Policy Center reports. Yet too often the easy access to guns, coupled with
the racial segregation, high unemployment, failing schools and mass incarceration that leads to
such carnage, is ignored by politicians in favor of a facile condemnation of black-on-black crime
(in contrast to white-on-white crime, which is rarely spoken of) and the decline of the black family. The black communitys relationship with guns remains fraught and ambivalent, with one-third
of African-Americans owning guns, compared with just over half of whites. Blacks favor stricter gun control laws, perhaps due to a deeper understanding that stand your ground laws have, as
in the George Zimmerman case, made it more likely for white-on-black homicides to be considered justified. The brutal deaths in Charleston are part of long history of American violence against
The deeper violence has been in the

black communities. Guns have been the most dramatic weapon used against blacks but perhaps not the most effective.
generational neglect, demonization and stigma that American society has attached to blackness
nationally. One hundred and fifty years after Juneteenth delivered the good news of freedom to blacks on the outskirts of Texas, too many African-Americans reside in another country:
a world marked by poverty, racial segregation, poor schools and easy access to guns. The racial impact of Americas gun culture affects the
black community on multiple levels, often unforgivingly. State-sanctioned violence, as practiced by

law enforcement, targets blacks with a vengeance for crimes both real and imagined, as we have
witnessed in meticulous detail since Ferguson. Armed vigilantes have also played a role, from the
racial terror of the Klan to the shooting in Charleston. Perhaps most depressing is the black gun violence by young
people who have been abandoned by mainstream society to join gangs, engage in turf wars and
debase themselves through acts of killing that further dehumanize their very existence. The hard truth about
race, gun violence and divisions in America is that the very acts of racial violence being decried in Charleston are connected to a long and continuous history of racial and economic oppression.
Its one rooted in an intimate relationshipbetween racial slavery and capitalism, Jim Crow and
the criminal justice system, and racial terror and white powerthat has always been backed by
guns.
In the long-term, only the plan can create the cultural shift necessary to change the
undercurrent of gun violence in America Australia proves.
DONOHUE 15: [JOHN DONOHUE, columnist at Newsweek, Gun Control: What We Can Learn From Other Advanced
Countries, Newsweek, 10/3/15]
The story of Australia, which had 13 mass shootings in the 18-year period from 1979 to 1996 but
none in the succeeding 19 years, is worth examining. The turning point was the 1996 Port Arthur
massacre in Tasmania, in which a gunman killed 35 individuals using semiautomatic weapons. In
the wake of the massacre, the conservative federal government succeeded in implementing tough
new gun control laws throughout the country. A large array of weapons were bannedincluding the Glock semiautomatic handgun
used in the Charleston shootings. The government also imposed a mandatory gun buy back that substantially reduced gun possession in Australia. The effect was that
both gun suicides and homicides (as well as total suicides and homicides) fell. In addition, the 1996 legislation made it a crime to use firearms in self-defense. When I
mention this to disbelieving NRA supporters they insist that crime must now be rampant in Australia. In fact, the
Australian murder rate has
fallen to close to one per 100,000 while the U.S. rate, thankfully lower than in the early 1990s, is still
roughly at 4.5 per 100,000over four times as high. Moreover, robberies in Australia occur at only
about half the rate of the U.S. (58 in Australia versus 113.1 per 100,000 in the U.S. in 2012). How did Australia do it? Politically, it
took a brave prime minister to face the rage of Australian gun interests. John Howard wore a bullet-proof vest when
he announced the proposed gun restrictions in June 1996. The deputy prime minister was hung in effigy. But Australia did not have a
domestic gun industry to oppose the new measures, so the will of the people was allowed to emerge. And today, support for the safer, gun-
restricted Australia is so strong that going back would not be tolerated by the public. That
Australia hasnt had a mass shooting since 1996 is likely more than merely the result of the
considerable reduction in gunsits certainly not the case that guns have disappeared altogether. I
suspect that the country has also experienced a cultural shift between the shock of the Port Arthur
massacre and the removal of guns from every day life as they are no longer available for self-
defense and they are simply less present throughout the country. Troubled individuals, in other words, are not constantly
being reminded that guns are a means to address their alleged grievances to the extent that they
were in the past, or continue to be in the U.S.
Domestic Disarmament
Thus, the plan: The United States federal government will prohibit the ownership of
private handguns and implement a reimbursement policy to collect handguns
currently in circulation. I reserve the right to clarify.
1992] VM
PROPOSED HANDGUN LEGISLATION Prohibits the importation, exportation, manufacture,

sale, purchase, transfer, receipt, possession, or transportation of handguns. Establishes a "grace
period" during which time handguns may be turned into any law enforcement agency with
impunity and for reimbursement at the greater of either $25 or the fair market value of the gun. Allows an exception for: *
agencies of federal, state, or local government (military and law enforcement) * collectors of antique
(nonserviceable) firearms * federally-licensed handgun sporting clubs; the clubs must be founded for bonafide target or
sport shooting; must maintain possession and control of the handguns used by its members; must have procedures and facilities for keeping the handguns secure when
not in a local law enforcement facility; and may not have as members persons whose membership would violate state of federal law *
federally-licensed
professional security guard services [operating with similar conditions as those set for handgun clubs] Sets up penalties of up
to $5,000, or up to 5 years imprisonment, or both, for violation of the provisions of the Act. We suggest
the following friendly amendment to Senator Chafee's proposed legislation: Extend the above prohibitions to ammunition for handguns, allow for the exceptions to
apply also to ammunition, and establish a "grace period" during which those who turn over ammunition to any law enforcement agency would be reimbursed at the
fair market value.
A primary function of the state is to provide civil order and promote an atmosphere
of peaceful deliberation only domestic disarmament solves.
1992] VM
The most elementary duty of a community is

Of all the issues that plague our communities, none is more severe than pervasive violence.
to provide a safe, civil order to its members. The fact that in all too many of our communities children
have to sleep on the floors of their homes to dodge drug dealers' bullets; that many of our cities'
ordinary citizens cannot walk their streets not to mention parks with impunity; that we lose more
lives to mayhem than any other established democracy, are all deeply troubling signs of our violence-ridden society. The
senseless, brutal killing of innocent people is a tragedy that can be stopped, and the danger that our cities can be turned into Beiruts or a Dubrovniks must be averted.
True, violence
has many sources. However, none can be as effectively and rapidly removed as the
technology of violence. Given the proper political support by the people who oppose the pro-gun lobby, legislation to remove the guns from private
hands, acts like the legislation drafted by Senator John Chafee, can be passed in short order. There are no particular technical difficulties to implement the legislation;
no need to develop new vaccines, space stations, or even to fashion yet one more bureaucracy. Moreover, the benefits would be very quickly and dramatically visible,
adding support to the disarmament measures. The record of those areas that implemented even a limited set of gun controls shows the value of these measures. For
example, a District of Columbia law that banned the purchase, sale, transfer, or possession of handguns
by civilians ". . . coincided with an abrupt decline in homicides and suicides by firearms in the
District of Columbia . . . . Our data suggest that restrictions on access to guns in the District of
Columbia prevented an average of 47 deaths each year after the law was implemented."1 Last but not least,
one of the major Communitarian concerns is the proliferations of rights and the dearth of social
responsibilities. As our report on the repeated rulings of the Supreme Court shows (see below), the notion, endlessly propagandized by the gun lobby, that
there is a right to bear arms by private individuals is not to be found in the Constitution. To suggest that citizens have a responsibility to
try to resolve their differences peacefully and by non-violent means, and if this cannot be achieved
to turn to courts and legitimate authorities not to guns, is at the heart of the Communitarian
perspective.
Only domestic disarmament solves all measures are political suicide, but only the
plan has the benefits of solving gun violence.
Etzioni 15 [Amitai Etzioni, University Professor and Professor of International Relations at The George Washington University, Needed: Domestic
Disarmament, Not 'Gun Control', HuffPost, 12/7/15] VM
Advocates of gun control frequently cite the much lower levels of gun violence in other developed
nations -- such as Canada and the UK -- in support of the measures they promote. However, these very low levels of
gun violence have not been achieved by gun control but -- by domestic disarmament. Most people
have no guns in these fully democratic nations and have no way of getting them, legally or
otherwise. It is hence at best nave, sometimes disingenuous, to imply that if several gun control measure would be enacted -- and somehow enforced -- the U.S.
would gain what these other nations take for granted. (By the way, Black Lives Matters may wish to take note: In these blessed nations most cops, most of the time,
have no guns either.) Given
that even micro gun control measures will be effectively blocked by the NRA
and its allies, and that promoting mini measures as potentially effective is misleading, progressives
may as well go for the big enchilada: Call for domestic disarmament. One may say that the Supreme Court, after 250
years in which the Second Amendment was read as allowing only a well-regulated militia to have guns, recently reinterpreted it to mean that there is an individualized
right to own guns. This suggests that we may have to get to domestic disarmament through the back door. Make the gun manufacturers liable for harm done with their
products. Ban the sale of ammunition. And vote for a president that will add to the Supreme Court those who will read the Second Amendment as written. Above all,
domestic disarmament is a true, compelling vision which cannot be said about the small gun control
measures that are currently promoted by some of the most enlightened people among us.
Plan is the least costly method to cut down on gun violence.
1992] VM
unlike drug rehabilitation, prison construction, and the training of more cops, domestic
Moreover,
disarmament can be rapidly implemented. While the initial cost may be high especially if one is to
buy out all existing arms manufacturers and arms now in private hands at some publicly set price,
rather than confiscate them this is a one-time cost. In contrast, expanding prisons and police forces
involves recurring costs that in accumulation are much higher. Politically, the National Rifle Association and its allies could not be
more opposed to domestic disarmament than they are to the vanilla measures favored by cautious politicians and experts. More importantly, the public at large could truly rally for a program that
public support would lend the program the kind of strong support at the
would have a major effect on violent crime. This
ballot box which is lacking for gun "control" measures. One might take into account that the gun lobby has three subconstituencies. Gun
collectors may be accommodated by provisions allowing them to keep their collection, but rendering them inoperative (cement in the barrel is my favorite technique). Hunters
might be allowed (if one feels this "sport" must be tolerated) to use long guns that cannot be concealed, without sights or powerful bullets, making the event much more
"sporting." Finally, super-patriots, who still believe they need their right to bear arms to protect us from the Commies, might be deputized and invited
to participate in the National Guard, as long as the weapons with which they are trained are kept in state controlled armories. All this is acceptable, as
long as all other guns and bullets are removed from private hands.
Freedom from gun violence is a public good that ought to be regulated by the state.
Kocsis 15: [Michael Kocsis, Adjunct Lecturer of Philosophy at Utica College, Gun Ownership and Gun Culture in the United States of
America, Essays in Philosophy, Volume 16 Issue 2 Philosophy & Gun Control, 2015]
Those who would restrict gun ownership envision society through the lens of public safety. It is not freedom to own guns, but freedom from guns, that marks this side
of the debate. To clarify the vision, we can describe gun safety in the terminology of public goods. I will suggest below that safety from gun
violence is a public good which, although somewhat obscure and difficult to defend, lends credence to the gun-restricting platform. Ultimately it is
rooted in a proposition mentioned previously: If freedom to own guns is dangerous to public safety, gun ownership
should be regulated to a degree that effectively affirms public safety. Again, the social costs of gun ownership become
the central issue in the regulation of deadly weapons (Cook and Ludwig 2006). The notion of public good is wide enough to include both natural and human-
created resources: clean air and water; public services like electricity; minerals and topsoil; high literacy; democratic competence and national feeling. All such goods
are valuable to the community as a whole and their cultivation is itself a public good justified by its benefit the community as a whole. One can find countless public
goods distributed unevenly across the worlds existing regions, and one can envision many other public goods which have yet to be achieved. A parallel way to think
about public goods is to think in terms of common resources. Public spaces like parks and wildlife preserves can be conceptualized as common resources and so can
clean air and water, which are among the most essential global resources still remaining but not yet owned .
Access to natural resources, on
this view, is conceived as a trust wherein the authorities are tasked to manage and maintain them
for the benefit of the community. We can think of others in terms of the creation and development of common public resources. Of course, as
American ecologist Garrett Hardin (1915- 2003) once argued, common resources are susceptible to private exploitation. Hardins famous example of a small
community of shepherds reveals a dangerous social tendency; in any such community, individual shepherds see the obvious benefit of increasing their private herds
while the community as a whole fails to foresee the threat posed by over-exploitation of their essential grazing pasture. Indeed, Hardin claimed, even the existence of
the shepherd community is in jeopardy due to the individual decisions of so many shepherds. Public
goods are concerned with common
resources, and they are effectively managed only when they bring about positive social outcomes. It
is part of our notion of common resources and public goods that restrictions will be necessary to
protect the resource from excessive use. But the restrictions need not be onerous, and their benefit
is shared universally. Public goods require a degree of state control, but in many instances such
control is justifiable and to the advantage of all. A few might prefer unlimited freedom of action, but we undeniably benefit as a whole
from the restrictions imposed by coercive governing authorities. It seems clear that Hardins example exaggerates the necessity of this social dynamic. He simply
accepts that communities are doomed to fall into the same self-interested pattern of behaviour. But as we know, many successful communities have learned to manage
the dynamic; promoting and protecting a common resource depends on mutual trust and bonds of social affection, and where these virtues are present, the value of the
public good is seen as outweighing the problematic constraints. Thinking specifically about the public good of safety from gun violence, we can develop three related
lines of argument. (1) First,
high levels of gun ownership are empirically related to high gun mortality. Such
an argument would draw upon from scientific and social-scientific studies of American society,
several of which point decisively to grave and unintended consequences force us to re-think rates of
production of at least of new firearms. Gun ownership is positively related to gun-related suicides and homicides; there is evidence that
guns do not merely serve as substitutes for other means of killing, but increase the overall rates of suicide and homicide (Stroebe 2013: 1). Similarly, Cook and
Ludwig focus on the negative externalities of gun ownership. Their study is designed to shows that under certain reasonable assumptions, the average annual
marginal social cost of household gun ownership is in the range of $100 to $1800 (Cook and Ludwig 2006: 379).
Domestic Violence
Status quo American guns laws disproportionately harm victims of intimate partner
violence reform is necessary.
Everytown 14: [Everytown for Gun Safety, GUNS AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: America's Uniquely Lethal Domestic
Violence Problem, 6/16/14]
Like many women who suffer domestic abuse, Zina Daniel had endured years of escalating attacks by her husband and finally sought a restraining order. Under
federal law, this prohibited her husband from buying or possessing firearms, and for good reason. His threats terrorize my every waking moment, she wrote in her
petition. He said he would kill me if I left him or even contacted the police.1 Zinas fear was justified: two days later her husband exploited a loophole in our
nations laws and bought a gun from an unlicensed seller on the website Armslist.com, evading a background check. Three days later Zina was dead. Americas
weak gun laws failed Zina, just as they fail countless other American women each year. In theory, these laws
are designed to protect women in Zinas circumstances, by keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers. But in practice, the laws are poorly
defined and poorly enforced, and the results are as predictable as they are devastating. Women in
the United States are eleven times more likely to be murdered with guns than women in other high-
income countries.2 When it comes to gun violence, the most dangerous place for a woman in the
developed world is America. Domestic violence in America is to a significant degree a problem of
gun violence. Over the past 25 years, more intimate partner homicides in the U.S. have been
committed with guns than with all other weapons combined.3 And people with a history of
committing domestic violence are five times more likely to subsequently murder an intimate
partner when a firearm is in the house.4 At the same time, an astonishing share of gun violence in America is driven by domestic violence.
More than half of women murdered with guns in the U.S. in 2011 at least 53 percent were
killed by intimate partners or family members.5 And research by Everytown for Gun Safety establishes that this is also true for mass
shootings: in 57 percent of the mass shootings between January 2009 and June 2014, the perpetrator
killed an intimate partner or family member.6 Because of the risk that firearms pose when they intersect with domestic violence, a
series of federal and state laws aim to keep guns out of the hands of the most dangerous domestic violence offenders. The strongest laws prohibit domestic abusers and
stalkers from buying or possessing guns, require background checks for all gun sales, and create processes to ensure that abusers and stalkers surrender the guns
already in their possession. When these laws are on the books and enforced properly, they save lives. In the past sixteen years, the background check system has kept
hundreds of thousands of guns out of abusers hands and prevented countless crimes.7 And in states that require background checks for all handgun sales, there are 38
percent fewer women shot to death by intimate partners.8 But because of loopholes in these laws and failures to enforce them, they do too little to curb the uniquely
lethal American problem of guns and violence against women. Four gaps in the law are particularly harmful: First, federal
law does nothing to
keep guns out of the hands of abusive dating partners or convicted stalkers. The federal laws
prohibiting domestic abusers from buying or owning guns do not apply to dangerous people
convicted of misdemeanor stalking offenses or to dating partnerseven though more women in the U.S. are killed by their
dating partners than by their spouses.9 In Everytowns analysis of mass shootings, 25 percent of perpetrators that targeted an intimate partner had never married them
Second, in 35 states, state law does not
nor had a child together, and thus would not likely qualify as intimate partners under current law.
prohibit all people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence crimes and all people subject to
restraining orders from buying or using guns.10 So while domestic abusers in those states cannot possess guns under federal law, local
law enforcement and prosecutors do not have the tools they need to enforce those restrictions. Third, federal law (and the law in most
states) allows domestic abusers and stalkers to easily evade gun prohibitions by purchasing guns
from unlicensed, private sellers. Federal law only requires background checks for gun sales at licensed dealers. Sixteen states require checks on
all handgun sales, but in the remaining states, prohibited abusers seeking to avoid a background check have little trouble purchasing a gun from an unlicensed seller
they meet online or at a gun show. Prohibited domestic abusers are well aware of this loopholeand have taken advantage of it to deadly effect. In a first-of-its-kind
investigation of illegal online gun sales, Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that 1 of 4 prohibited purchasers seeking guns online had a domestic violence arrest.
Finally, forty-one states do not require all prohibited domestic abusers to relinquish guns they
already own. Without a clear law on the books that provides an enforceable process by which
offenders relinquish their firearms, it is too easy for dangerous abusers to keep their guns even
after they commit offenses that prohibit them from having them. The strongest state laws establish a clear process that
courts and law enforcement can use to make sure prohibited batterers turn in their guns, but far too many states lack these laws or do not enforce them adequately.
Gun control is a critical feminist issue the aff checks back against misogynistic
tendencies in American culture and reduces violence.
CHEUNG 15: [KYLIE CHEUNG, News & Politics writer for Bustle, Why Gun Control Is A Feminist Issue, Because Mass Shootings
Disproportionately Target Women, 10/5/2015]
On Thursday, yet another mass shooting occurred, this time on the Umpqua Community College campus. The shooting resulted in 10 deaths, including the gunman, and a renewed national
gun control is seldom regarded as

dialogue around the need for gun control. Though often discussed from the crucial angles of public safety and mental health,
the feminist issue it arguably is, The Guardian points out. It's rarely taken into account that not only are many acts of gun
violence performed in the context of domestic violence, according to Bloomberg, but some recent
mass shootings have also been reportedly motivated by misogyny. Some psychologists have even
identified pervasive societal concepts about hyper-masculinity as motivating factors in mass
shootings, which are predominantly carried out by male shooters. Allowing men with histories of
domestic abuse to obtain guns, or not performing thorough background checks that could reveal
violent histories, exposes women to be disproportionately victimized by gun violence. A study
published in 2013 by the University of Washington revealed that a strong majority of mass
shootings in America were carried out by white males and found a "correlation between feelings of
entitlement among white males and homicidal revenge against a specific demographic." One of feminism's
overarching goals is to check the destructive consequences of male and racial privilege in society, and according to the 2013 study, gun violence is arguably among these. Simultaneously, in
many recent cases, the "specific demographic" in question is often racial minorities or women. In July, after leading a mass
shooting at a screening of Trainwreck in a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, it was revealed that John Russell Houser, the gunman identified by police, had a
history of violence toward his wife and daughter and misogynistic tendencies that potentially
motivated him to carry out the shooting. According to the Associated Press, Houser's estranged wife once had to remove guns from their home and had him
committed, alleging he was "a danger to himself and others" and citing his "threatening behavior" in protesting their daughter's wedding. Although Houser never directly proclaimed or recorded
his motive, it's certainly worth noting that he selected the predominantly female audience of Trainwreck, a feminist comedy written and produced by a famous feminist comedian, to conduct his
shooting spree. Houser legally obtained the gun that he used to kill three (including himself) and injure nine, according to CNN, despite a history of allegations of threatening his wife and
daughter, mental health issues, and posts inciting religious extremism from social media accounts associated with him. In some of these posts, Houser seems to have praised the anti-LGBTQ
Westboro Baptist Church and shared links to misogynistic web pages discussing the roles of women in the church. The International Business Times reports that according to CNN investigative
correspondent Drew Griffin, a background check had been performed on Houser prior to selling him firearms, but his record lacked any convictions for serious crimes, despite domestic violence
Griffin's findings points out

allegations and minor legal issues. Thus, Houser simply did not raise any red flags on the "instant background checks" performed on him.
two immediate concerns: the first being that domestic violence simply isn't taken seriously enough,
and the second being that in many cases, background checks for gun purchases aren't thorough
enough. Two women paid the price for gun control shortcomings in a shooting that was potentially motivated by one man's misogyny. In May 2014, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six
and injured 14 in the notorious Isla Vista shootings in California, as he attempted to carry out his"retribution" against women for rejecting him, as well as sexually active men he envied. In a
disturbing video Rodger posted prior to the shootings, he claimed he would "slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blond slut [he saw]," according to the LA Times. In the video, Rodger also
voiced his sense of entitlement to sexual favors from women, believing all women deserved to be punished for "rejecting" him. In a 140-page manifesto, Rodger went so far as to propose all
women be kept in concentration camps, as if it weren't clear enough his actions were rooted in deep-seated misogyny. According to the Los Angeles Times, all three guns registered under
Rodger's name had been obtained legally. Parents of Rodger's victims placed blame on the NRA and politicians above Rodger himself for not carrying out safe gun control regulation, and gun
control proponents pointed out that doctors as well as Rodger's parents had issued warnings about his mental health, according to NBC News. The Isla Vista shootings serve as a clearer example
of how gun control could prevent violence that disproportionately targets women. More recently, in September, two Delta State University professors were shot and killed by one professor's live-
in partner, identified as Shannon Lamb.Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti pointed out that the shooting was rarely referred to the act of domestic violence that it was. "Until we start talking
seriously about the intersection of gun violence and intimate partner violence, we will continue to watch as murders many of them preventable are perpetrated again and again," Valenti
writes. And indeed, according to Bloomberg, of all women murdered by intimate partners between 2001 and 2012, 55 percent were killed with guns. Bloomberg also reports that women in the
a strong majority of guns

United States are 11 times more likely to be killed with guns than women in any other "high-income country." Most disturbing of all,
involved in such acts of violence are obtained entirely legally. Obviously, women aren't the only
people affected by gun violence, nor are they the only group who would benefit from stronger gun
control laws. Domestic violence appears to be more of a strong risk factor of loose gun control than
a direct consequence of it. However, there is no denying that gunmen involved in mass shootings are frequently white males: between 1982 and 2012, all but one mass
shooter were male, and in 44 of 62 case, the shooter was a white male. The desire to kill many is often rooted in some mental instability, but as Tanya Luhrmann, an anthropologist at
Stanford University, points out, "Mental illness actually does reflect the local culture." Tendencies toward violence
are subtly rooted in how men are brought up by society, which arguably glorifies aggression in
males. And as multiple studies reveal, a sense of born entitlement develops naturally in boys, who are more likely
to feel unjustly wronged and respond with violence than females who encounter rejection and
hardship. The simple fact is that an ingrained sense of male entitlement isn't going anywhere, but gun control is a critical feminist issue as it
could check the tragic consequences of male entitlement turned violent.
Crime a2 market
UK proves a handgun solves in the long run. Faiola 13: Anthony Faiola. "After shooting tragedies,
Britain went after guns." Washington Post. February 1, 2013.
After Britains sweeping handgun ban was imposed in 1997, for instance, tens of thousands of
weapons were collected from legal owners in exchange for fair market value, cutting off supplies of
stolen handguns that ended up in criminal hands and largely forbidding their sale by gun dealers in
Britain. Nevertheless, statistics show that gun violence in Britain increased for the next several years. But
starting in 2005 and following years of anti-gun sweeps by police forces in British cities that made
illegal guns far less accessible gun violence began to ebb. In 2011, England and Wales recorded
7,024 offenses involving firearms, down 37 percent from their peak in 2005. Given that British crime
statistics also count fake guns as firearms, criminologists say the number of violent crimes involving
real guns is likely significantly lower. One thing that is now certain is that its much more difficult to get
a gun in this country, said Jack Straw, Britains former cabinet minister in charge of home affairs and
one of the chief architects of the 1997 Firearms Act.
Consistent data indicate that gun bans both cut crime rates and arent offset by
underground markets.
Cook and Ludwig 10: [Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, Five Myths About Gun Control, Washington Post, 2010] VM
3. When more households have guns for self-defense, crime goes down. Fans of the Heller decision in D.C., and people hoping for a similar outcome in Chicago,
believe that eliminating handgun bans and having more households keep guns for self-protection leads to less crime. Therationale: More guns
enable more people to defend themselves against attackers; there might also be a general deterrent
effect, if would-be criminals know that their victims could be armed. Such arguments cannot be dismissed. The key question is whether the self-defense benefits of
owning a gun outweigh the costs of having more guns in circulation. And the costs can be high: more and cheaper guns available to criminals in the "secondary
market" -- including gun shows and online sales -- which is almost totally unregulated under federal laws, and increased risk of a child or a spouse misusing a gun at
home. Our research suggests that as many as 500,000 guns are stolen each year in the United States, going directly into the hands of people who are, by definition,
criminals. The
data show that a net increase in household gun ownership would mean more homicides
and perhaps more burglaries as well. Guns can be sold quickly, and at good prices, on the underground market. 4. In high-crime urban
neighborhoods, guns are as easy to get as fast food. There are roughly 250 to 300 million guns in circulation in the United States. That number strikes some as so high
that regulation seems futile. Opponents of gun control cite the sentiment of one Chicago gang member, who said in a 1992 newspaper interview that buying a gun is
"like going through the drive-through window. Give me some fries, a Coke and a 9-millimeter." Our own study of the underground gun
market in Chicago, with Columbia sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh and Harvard criminologist
Anthony Braga, contradicts this claim. [shows] Handguns that can be bought legally for around
$100 sell on the street in Chicago for $250 to $400. Surveys of people who have been arrested find
that a majority of those who didn't own a gun at the time of their arrest, but who would want one, say it would take more than a week to
get one. Some people who can't find a gun on the street hire a broker in the underground market to help them get one . It costs more and takes
more time to get guns in the underground market -- evidence that gun regulations do make some
difference. 5. Repealing Chicago's handgun ban will dramatically increase gun crimes. Many legal analysts predict that Chicago's handgun ban is done for.
While proponents of gun control may feel discouraged, the actual impact could be minimal, depending on what regulations the court allows Chicago to put on the
books instead. New York City, for example, makes it quite difficult for private citizens to obtain handguns through an expensive and drawn-out permitting process
that falls short of an outright ban. Local officials from Dodge City to Chicago have understood that some regulation of firearms within city limits is in the public's
interest, and that regulation and law enforcement are important complements in the effort to reduce gun violence. Even before the repeal of D.C.'s handgun ban, the
city's police reestablished a gun-recovery unit and focused on seizing illegal firearms. The city's homicide rate has been relatively flat the past several years. If the
court decides that Chicago must follow D.C's lead in getting rid of its handgun ban, we can only hope that it leaves the door open for sensible control measures.
This influence is empirically confirmed --- denial of purchase decreases risk of
recidivism.
(Garen J. Wintemute 13 [renowned expert on the public health crisis of gun violence and a pioneer in the field of injury epidemiology and
prevention of firearm violence, which results in approximately 30,000 deaths a year and approximately 75,000 nonfatal injuries seen in hospital
emergency departments, md, mph], REDUCING GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis, Center for
Gun Policy and Research Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 2013//FT)
Most importantly, denial

appears to reduce risk for new criminal activity among those persons who are
denied. The strongest evidence for this comes from a quasi-experimental evaluation of Californias
decision to extend its prohibitions to persons convicted of violent misdemeanors (Wintemute et al. 2001). The
prohibition lasts for 10 years following their convictions. Study subjects were aged 21 to 34; all had prior convictions for violent misdemeanors.
The intervention group comprised 927 persons who sought to purchase handguns in 1991 and were denied under the terms of the new policy. The
control group included 727 persons who sought to purchase handguns in 1989 or 1990, just before the policy changed, and whose purchases were
approved. Subjects were followed for up to three years. Overall, 33.0% of subjects were arrested during follow-up: 21.8% for a firearm- related
or violent offense and 22.1% for offenses of other types (Table 6.4). Per-
sons whose purchases were approved were
more likely than those who were denied to be arrested for a firearm-related or violent offense (relative
hazard 1.2) but not for other offenses (relative hazard 0.9). In both groups, as always, risk of arrest was strongly related to age and the number of
prior misdemeanor convictions (Table 6.4). Denial
was associated with a significant decrease in risk of arrest,
both overall and for subjects stratified by age or number of prior convictions. These findings persisted in
multivariate analysis (Table 6.5). Purchasers were more likely than denied persons to be arrested for new firearm-related or violent crimes
(relative hazard 1.3), but not for other crimes (relative hazard 1.0). Simi- lar results were seen in subgroups stratified by age, number of prior
convictions for any crime, and number of prior convictions for a firearm-related or violent crime. The only exception was for subjects with three
or more prior convictions for firearm-related or violent crimes. In this group with an established pattern of such activity, denial of handgun
purchase may have no effect.
People with records are way more prone to handgun violence.

Garen J. Wintemute 13 [renowned expert on the public health crisis of gun violence and a pioneer in the field of injury epidemiology and
Gun Policy and Research Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 2013, BE
The research on misdemeanor violence comes from California. The first study concerned 5,923 authorized purchasers of handguns ages 21 to 49
in 1977 (Wintemute et al. 1998). Of these handgun purchasers, 3,128 had at least one prior misdemeanor conviction (not necessarily for a violent
offense), and 2,795 had no prior criminal history. Over 15 years of follow-up, 50.4%
of purchasers with prior convictions,
but only 9.8% of those with no prior criminal history, were arrested for a new offense (Table 6.1).
Approximately one in six purchasers with a prior misdemeanor conviction (15.4%) was arrested for a violent Crime Index offense: murder, rape,
robbery, or aggravated assault. There was a strong dose-response relationship among men; risk of arrest increased with the number of prior
convictions (Table 6.1). There also appeared to be some specificity of association, in that prior convictions for offenses involving firearms or
violence were associated with the greatest risk of subsequent arrests for violent or firearm-related offenses. Handgun
purchasers with
two or more prior convictions for violent crimes were at substantially increased risk of arrest for
violent crimes generally (relative risk 10.4), and the violent Crime In- dex offenses (relative risk 15.1). But even
purchasers with only a single prior misdemeanor conviction, and that for an offense involving
neither firearms nor violence, were still approximately five times as likely as those with no prior
criminal history to be arrested subsequently for firearm-related or violent crimes. At the time these
handgun purchases were made, California still relied on the criminal history criteria in federal statute, as many states do today. On that parameter,
this study population is generally comparable to persons who purchase handguns now from
licensed retailers across the United States. More recent research measured the incidence of
criminal activity serious enough to prohibit firearm ownership among people who had previously,
and legally, purchased handguns (Wright and Wintemute 2010). This study was conducted after California began prohibiting
violent misdemeanants from purchasing firearms, and such persons are not part of the study population. A cohort of 7,256 handgun purchasers in
1991, 2,761 with a non-prohibiting criminal history and 4,495 with no criminal record at the time of purchase, were followed for up to five years.
During that time, 21.0%
of purchasers with convictions for non-violent misdemeanors were arrested, and
4.5% were convicted of a crime that prohibited firearm ownership under federal law. The incidence of
criminal activity among those with no criminal history was much lower; 3.7% were arrested for any reason, and 0.9% became prohibited persons.
Prior conviction for a non-violent misdemeanor was associated with a five-fold increase in risk of
conviction for a prohibiting offense (hazard ra- tio 5.1), as in the prior study.
Suicide
Suicides are the largest source of gun violence in the US and current cultural norms
hide the reality of many victims only effective limitations can address the issue.
MARIANI 15: [MIKE MARIANI , Columnist at Newsweek, Americas Biggest Gun Problem Is Suicide, Newsweek, 11/21/15]
Theres a culture of euphemism in obituaries involving gun suicide; died suddenly, died at
home and "passed unexpectedly" are all used to cover an ugly fact. This systemic aversion to the
topic has made it difficult for the general population to understand how suicide and gun ownership
overlap, and enables firearm suicide to flourish in darkness. For example, its rarely something people consider when
contemplating why someone took his own life; we dont say he owned a gun the way we cite things like clinical depression, financial woes and drug problemsbut
we probably should. Evidence
suggests guns are not just a means of executing a hard and fast decision to
kill oneself; they are a risk factor that should be considered alongside mental illness, substance
abuse and family history. David Hemenway, a professor of health policy and the director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center (HICRC),
has studied firearm violence and the relationship between guns and suicide in the U.S. for 15 years. In that time, he has amassed an abundance of statistical evidence
indicating that access to guns increases the chances of suicide. Why does Arizona have more suicides than Massachusetts? he asks. "Is it mental health, is it diet, or
is it alcohol or smoking, or is it depression? Its none of those. The one thing that explains different rates of suicide across regions, states and even cities is simple:
guns. In a study published in 2008 in the New England Journal of Medicine, Hemenway and his co-authors found that men were 3.7 times more likely to die by gun
suicide in the 15 states with the highest rates of gun ownership compared to the six states with the lowest. Women in the states with the highest gun ownership were
7.9 times more likely to kill themselves with a firearm. And in a 2014 paper published in the International Review of Law
and Economics, Justin Briggs and Alexander Tabarrok found that for every 1 percentage point
increase in household gun ownership, suicide rates go up between 0.5 and 0.9 percent. The Briggs-Tabarrok
effect, as it became known, starkly illustrates how in America having more guns leads to more suicides. One of the great misconceptions
about suicide attempters is that, after considerable deliberation, they have reached a point of no
return. In fact, in many cases the complete opposite is true. In an oft-cited 2001 study published in Suicide & Life-Threatening
Behavior, 153 survivors of suicide attempts were asked when they had made the decision to kill
themselves. Seventy percent of the responders said they had decided to kill themselves within an
hour of the actual attempt; 24 percent said within less than five minutes. This phenomenon is
known as suicide impulsivity, and it seems to find its perfect match in firearms. Shooting yourself
does not entail the preparation of overdosing on pills or the grisly persistence of slitting your wrists.
It is immediate and requires zero protracted thought: the perfect mechanism for the instant
fulfillment of what might otherwise be a fleeting inclination. The problem is that firearms are frighteningly lethal. The most
common method of attempting suicide, overdosing on drugs, has a completion rate of just 3 percent (in other words, 97 percent of attempters survive). Gun
suicide, by comparison, has a completion rate of 85 percent. This is surely gun violence at its most
virulentBerettas and Glock 17s crystallizing passing impulses into something horrifically
permanentand yet it is rarely, if ever, acknowledged as a gun issue. For years, the HICRC has been trying to change
this through its Means Matter campaign, a suicide prevention initiative focused on what is called "means restriction. The idea is that if we can restrict the
availability of lethal means for individuals showing warning signs of suicide, we can stymie impulsive attempters until the desire passes, saving lives. There are
convincing precedents. One is what suicide prevention experts refer to as the "British coal-gas story." In the 1950s, domestic gas in the United Kingdom contained
high levels of carbon monoxide, and self-administered gas inhalation poisoning was the leading means of suicide in the country. By the end of the decade, carbon
monoxide poisoning accounted for roughly 2,500 suicides a year, slightly under half the nations total. In the 1960s, the British government undertook the
detoxification of domestic gas, replacing the coal-derived gas high in carbon monoxide with nontoxic natural gas. By the early 1970s, the country's suicide rate had
dropped by almost a third. Even more directly relevant is the success of an Israeli Defense Forces policy change that went into effect in 2006. That year, in an effort to
prevent suicides in the military90 percent of which occurred with firearms, often when soldiers were on weekend leavethe military didnt let soldiers take their
firearms off base on weekends. The suicide rate fell by 40 percent. Despite those impressive results, codifying some form of means restriction into law in the U.S.
seems impossible. Heres where politics enters the fray. Firearm
suicide by its very nature is a confluence of two social
issuesgun rights and suicidethat are most often discussed and understood in isolation, the
former a polarizing political wedge calcified along party lines, and the latter typically interpreted in
the context of mental health and psychiatric illness. Truly substantive means restrictionimposing significantly more stringent
background checks on handguns, for examplewould require a level of political consensus that is just not possible in a U.S. where Second Amendment furor is as
strong as ever. Even small compromises between gun owners and activists are fought over with vehemence. Take trigger locks, for example, the small metal devices
that clamp around a guns trigger. Those fighting for means restriction argue that by legally requiring guns to be stored in a locked container or secured with a trigger
lock, you could create enough of an impediment to gun access that it would significantly cut down on suicide ratesall without actually taking peoples guns away.
But Massachusetts is the only state with such a legal requirement, and in 2008s District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court struck down a portion of the
Firearms Control Regulations Act that required all firearms in Washington, D.C.the city with some of the strictest gun laws in the countryto be kept unloaded or
trigger locked, deeming it a violation of the Second Amendment. The fight over trigger locks might seem petty, but the reality is that even incremental limitations on
gun access could have dramatic effects on suicide rates. Thats because people can and do usually overcome the desire to kill
themselves. DeseRae L. Stage, 32, a photographer and writer who lives in Philadelphia, is one such survivor. Trapped in an abusive relationship, one night in
2006, Stage says she lost it. After a desperate call to her girlfriend was coldly rebuffed, I just decided that that was it. She took enough wine and pills to end her
life, but her girlfriend alerted the police, who barged into her apartment. They took her to the emergency room, where she was treated and released three hours later.
Today, Stage is an outspoken advocate for suicide attempters as founder of theLive Through This project, in which survivors tell their stories. After years working
with survivors, she knows firsthand that if you can eliminate a suicidal persons access to a gun, he or she will likely survive to tell the tale. Theres this myth that
someone who is suicidal, when impeded from an attempt, will just find another way, she says. Not true. The data backs her up: Over
90 percent of
all attempters never die by suicide. Limit access to bridges and guns, and that number will surely
creep toward 100 in the U.S.
Only effective gun control measures can minimize preventable suicide deaths the
plan is the best available option.
HSPS 08: [Harvard School of Public Health, Guns and suicide: A fatal link, Spring 2008]
In the United States, suicides outnumber homicides almost two to one. Perhaps the real tragedy
behind suicide deathsabout 30,000 a year, one for every 45 attemptsis that so many could be
prevented. Research shows that whether attempters live or die depends in large part on the ready availability
of highly lethal means, especially firearms. A study by the Harvard School of Public Health of all 50
U.S. states reveals a powerful link between rates of firearm ownership and suicides. Based on a survey of American households conducted in 2002, HSPH Assistant Professor of
Health Policy and Management Matthew Miller, Research Associate Deborah Azrael, and colleagues at the Schools Injury Control Research Center (ICRC), found that in states
where guns were prevalentas in Wyoming, where 63 percent of households reported owning gunsrates of suicide were higher. The
inverse was also true: where gun ownership was less common, suicide rates were also lower. The lesson?
Many lives would likely be saved if people disposed of their firearms, kept them locked away, or stored them outside the home.
Says HSPH Professor of Health Policy David Hemenway, the ICRCs director: Studies show that most attempters act on impulse, in
moments of panic or despair. Once the acute feelings ease, 90 percent do not go on to die by
suicide. But few can survive a gun blast. Thats why the ICRCs Catherine Barber has launched Means Matter, a campaign that asks the public to help
prevent suicide deaths by adopting practices and policies that keep guns out of the hands of vulnerable adults and children. For details, visit www.meansmatter.org.
Blocks
AT NCs
AT Autonomy NCs
Intrinsic freedoms outweigh those intended for preference satisfaction that
justifies gun bans even from an autonomy perspective.
Riddle 15: [Christopher Riddle, Utica College, On Risk & Responsibility: Gun Control and the Ethics of Hunting, Essays in Philosophy
Volume 16 Issue 2 Philosophy & Gun Control, 2015]
Arneson has suggested that to postulate that freedom is of intrinsic moral importance and should sometimes be
sought even at the expense of wellbeing is fetishistic, in much the same way that concentrating on means to freedom as though it were
valuable in itself it thoughts by Sen to be fetishistic. ix I take there to be at least two distinct kinds of freedom. The first
are freedoms that can be seen to be intrinsically good. These types of freedoms are few and far between. These
freedoms can be said to be intrinsically good because they are fertilethey promote even more
(quantity), greater forms of freedom (quality).x These freedoms are the kinds of freedoms that without, one would suffer corrosive
disadvantageone would be unable to pursue other valuable states of being. I take something like the freedom of bodily health
to be free from violent assaultto be a paradigmatic example of a freedom that is intrinsically good. Even if freedom from
violent assault did not increase ones ability to secure other valuable freedoms or states of being, it
would still be something that possesses worth. Conversely, most freedoms tend to be only instrumentally
good. Most freedoms involve preference satisfaction and are not necessarily good in and of
themselves. The freedom of play tends to be an instrumental freedom. It is good because it allows individuals to simply satisfy the preferences they have.
Certainly some basic level of leisure is necessarily, but the vast array of freedom we possess to decide what we do with our leisure time is not necessarily an intrinsic
good. This freedom is instrumentally good because it allows us to satisfy preferences we have. The important conclusion to draw from this distinction for the purposes
of this argument is that we should never permit freedoms of the second varietythose freedoms that result in
mere preference satisfactionto come at the cost of the first type of freedomsthose freedoms that
possess intrinsic worth. I suggest that mere preference satisfaction should take a back seat to the more
robust forms of freedom that can be seen as being good in and of themselves. To be clear, in what follows, I intend
to demonstrate that the freedom to own a gun for the purposes of hunting is a freedom that possesses only instrumental
worth, and ought to be restricted to secure the freedom of bodily healtha freedom with intrinsic
worth. In other words, it is an insufficient justification for hunting to state that someone would be happy, or happier, if permitted to hunt. Satisfying
preferences in this context by granting the freedom to own a gun comes at the cost of others bodily
healtha freedom with intrinsic worth. If the argument appears too abstract thus far, let me begin to contextualize it. I suspect we tend to
agree with my above claims in many contexts. Take the freedom to smoke for example. Individuals should be free to
do as they wish, but we begin to limit this freedom once it begins to infringe upon others. Now that we are
aware of the dangers of second-hand smoke, we, in many public places throughout the United States, deny smokers
the freedom to smoke. We deny them this right both for paternalistic reasons, but more of concern for this paper, because it puts others at risk. We take
the right to be free from bodily injury (to not be forced to suffer from secondhand smoke) to be far more important than the right of an individual to smoke wherever
they wish. Moreover, we take it to be the case that any restaurant, for example, that permits smoking, is acting irresponsibly and subjecting employees and customers
to unnecessary risk. Importantly,
we think both the smoker as well as the establishment permitting the
smoking ought to be held responsible for the risk one is subjected to as a result of their exercising
the freedom to smoke.
AT Guns Dont Kill People
Guns ownership is itself a violation it shapes peoples intentions of acting.
Dougherty 15: [Michael Brendan Dougherty, The conservative case for reforming America's sick gun culture, The Week, August 27,
2015]
We're often told that Americans are just more violent than other people, and that's why we have so
many guns. And I agree, to a point. But the truth might be the other way around, and conservatives should make generous allowances for
the pre-rational or the anti-rational in our politics. Our tools and our physical surroundings shape our self-conception and
our intentions. A beautiful church sanctuary reminds us of the transcendent and sends a hush over us. A well-appointed room may cause us to
stand straighter. And training with a hand gun, an object designed to kill other human beings,
causes us to imagine situations in which we might kill another human being. Doing this constantly
makes us more likely to "see" a situation in which we could take lethal action. It may cause us to
perceive more danger in the world than actually exists. Mentally unsound people are obviously much more likely to lose themselves in this
kind of self-induced paranoia, but a stable person should be aware of that pull on their subconscious intentions as
well. It is this intuition about human nature that makes me recoil instinctively from certain guns, often marketed as "tactical," which are designed to look sinister and appeal to young men
who spent a lot of time in their adolescence playing Counter-Strike.
(??) Even if the mere ownership of handguns does not constitute a violation, the
gun-person interaction increases violent potential.
Selinger 12: [EVAN SELINGER, associate professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, The Philosophy of the
Technology of the Gun, The Atlantic, 2012]
In principle, guns, like every technology, can be used in different ways to accomplish different
goals. Guns can be tossed around like Frisbees. They can be used to dig through dirt like shovels, or mounted on top of a fireplace mantel, as aesthetic objects.
They can even be integrated into cooking practices; gangster pancakes might make a tasty Sunday morning treat. But while all of these options remain physical
Such options are not practically viable
possibilities, they are not likely to occur, at least not in a widespread manner with regularity.
because gun design itself embodies behavior-shaping values; its material composition indicates the
preferred ends to which it "should" be used. Put in Ihde's parlance, while a gun's structure is "multistable" with respect to its possible
uses across a myriad of contexts, a partially determined trajectory nevertheless constrains which possibilities are easy to pursue and which of the intermediate and
difficult options are worth investing time and labor into. With respect to the trajectory at issue, guns
were designed for the sole purpose of
accomplishing radical and life-altering action at a distance with minimal physical exertion on the
part of the shooter. Since a gun's mechanisms were built for the purpose of releasing deadly projectiles outwards, it is difficult to imagine how one could
realistically find utility in using a gun to pursue ends that do not require shooting bullets. For the most part, a gun's excellence simply lies in its capacity to quickly fire
bullets that can reliably pierce targets. Using the butt of a gun to hammer the nail into a "Wanted" post--a common act in the old cowboy movies--is an exceptional
use. What the NRA position fails to convey, therefore, are the perceptual affordances offered by gun
possession and the transformative consequences of yielding to these affordances. To someone with a
gun, the world readily takes on a distinct shape. It not only offers people, animals, and things to
interact with, but also potential targets. Furthermore, gun possession makes it easy to be bold, even
hotheaded. Physically weak, emotionally passive, and psychologically introverted people will all be inclined to experience shifts in demeanor. Like many
other technologies, Ihde argues, guns mediate the human relation to the world through a dialectic in which
aspects of experience are both "amplified" and "reduced". In this case, there is a reduction in the
amount and intensity of environmental features that are perceived as dangerous, and a concomitant
amplification in the amount and intensity of environmental features that are perceived as calling
for the subject to respond with violence. French philosopher Bruno Latour goes far as to depict the experience of possessing a gun as one
that produces a different subject: "You are different with a gun in your hand; the gun is different with you
holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it
has entered into a relationship with you." While the idea that a gun-human combination can produce a new subject may seem extreme, it
is actually an experience that people (with appropriate background assumptions) typically attest to, when responding to strong architectural configurations. When
walking around such prestigious colleges as Harvard and the University of Chicago, it is easy to feel that one has suddenly become smarter. Likewise, museums and
sites of religious worship can induce more than a momentary inclination towards reflection; they can allow one to view artistic and spiritual matters as a contemplative
being.
AT Disadvantages
AT Self-Defense
Times, 12/18/2012] VM
could kill as many as 6 million people, in one of the worlds most populous cities. Weapons
exist on a continuum. Some weapons
country, the
AT Guns Solve Crime
Youre analysis is just wrong 1) private handgun ownership is likely to increase
bloodshed in shootings and 2) increased gun prevalence is positively correlated with
the frequency of shootings.
Follman 12: [Mark Follman, national affairs editor at Mother Jones, More Guns, More Mass ShootingsCoincidence?, Mother Jones,
2012]
In the wake of the massacres this year at a Colorado movie theater, a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, we set out to track
mass shootings in the United States over the last 30 years. We identified and analyzed 62 of them, and one striking
pattern in the data is this: In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun. And in
other recent (but less lethal) rampages in which armed civilians attempted to intervene, those civilians not only failed to stop the shooter but also were gravely wounded or killed. Moreover, we
found that the rate of mass shootings has increased in recent yearsat a time when America has
been flooded with millions of additional firearms and a barrage of new laws has made it easier than
ever to carry them in public places, including bars, parks, and schools. America has long been heavily armed relative to other societies, and our arsenal keeps
growing. A precise count isn't possible because most guns in the United States aren't registered and the
government has scant ability to track them, thanks to a legislative landscape shaped by powerful pro-gun groups such as the National Rifle Association.
But through a combination of national surveys and manufacturing and sales data, we know that the increase in firearms has far outpaced population growth. In 1995 there were an estimated 200
million guns in private hands. Today, there are around 300 millionabout a 50 percent jump. The US population, now over 314 million, grew by about 20 percent in that period. At this rate,
there will be a gun for every man, woman, and child before the decade ends. There is no evidence indicating that arming Americans
further will help prevent mass shootings or reduce the carnage, says Dr. Stephen Hargarten, a leading expert on emergency medicine
and gun violence at the Medical College of Wisconsin. To the contrary, there appears to be a relationship between the proliferation of
firearms and a rise in mass shootings: By our count, there have been two per year on average since
1982. Yet, 25 of the 62 cases we examined have occurred since 2006. In 2012 alone there have been seven mass shootings, and a
record number of casualties, with more than 140 people injured and killed. Armed civilians attempting to intervene are actually more
likely to increase the bloodshed, says Hargarten, "given that civilian shooters are less likely to hit their
targets than police in these circumstances." A chaotic scene in August at the Empire State Building put this starkly into perspective when New York City
police officers trained in counterterrorism confronted a gunman and wounded nine innocent bystanders in the process.
AT CPs
AT CP w/ Rights NC
Squo solves background checks
Shearjan 1/5 Obamas Action on Guns: What It Means for Background Checks By MICHAEL D.
SHEARJAN. 5, 2016 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/06/us/politics/guns-president-obama-executive-
action-background-checks.html
WASHINGTON President Obama on Tuesday formally announced executive action on guns in an
East Room ceremony.
Q. Will the presidents plan close the loophole that has allowed millions of guns to be purchased without
criminal background checks at gun shows and online bazaars?
A. No. Federal law already requires that anyone engaged in the business of selling guns must be
licensed and must conduct background checks on every purchase. The problem is that many sellers at
gun shows and on firearms websites claim to be hobbyists who are exempt from those requirements.
People who purchase guns from those sellers are not subject to criminal background checks.
Mr. Obamas executive action does not expand the existing law. Instead, his administration has now
clarified that people who claim to be hobbyists may actually be engaged in the business of
selling firearms if they operate an online gun store, pass out business cards or frequently sell guns in
their original packaging. The presidents action also reiterates that there are criminal penalties for
violating the law.
Q. So, is the president ordering better enforcement of the existing laws to crack down on people who are
selling without the proper licenses and background checks?
A. Yes, to the extent he can. He is asking Congress for funding to hire 200 new agents and investigators
with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, though that request may be denied by
Republican lawmakers. Mr. Obama says the F.B.I. will increase the number of workers who process the
background checks by 50 percent, or 230 people. He says that should reduce delays in a system that
receives 63,000 background check requests each day. He also announced the eventual development of a
more modern computer system that can process background checks 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The president is also seeking to close a loophole that has allowed people to avoid background checks
when they buy and sell certain weapons machine guns and sawed-off shotguns by forming
corporate entities and trusts to conduct the sales. A new regulation will clarify that those purchases
require background checks.
Q. Are there other provisions of the presidents plan that would help keep guns out of the hands of
criminals or mentally ill people?
A. Yes. The Social Security Administration will begin looking at how to link mental health records in its
system with the criminal background check data. The Department of Health and Human Services is
clarifying that health privacy rules do not bar states from reporting mental health records to the
background check system. And Mr. Obama is requesting $500 million from Congress to improve basic
mental health care.
In addition, Mr. Obama announced that the A.T.F. will spend $4 million to enhance a ballistics database
that analysts use to link guns to violent crimes. He ordered the Defense Department, the Justice
Department and the Department of Homeland Security to sponsor research into gun safety technology.
And at Mr. Obamas direction, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch wrote a letter to state officials to
encourage reporting of criminal
CP violates the NC, too youre out of luck.

Hsiao 15: [Timothy Hsiao, Professor at Florida State University, Against Gun Bans and Restrictive Licensing, Essays in Philosophy,
Volume 16, Issue 2, Philosophy & Gun Control, 2015]
First, given the scope of our discussion, it

is unjust to require prospective gun owners to justify their need to own a
gun. If an activity is not otherwise immoral, then the burden of proof is on the opponent of said
activity to give a reason in favor of restricting it. Even in cases in which the state has a paternalistic interest in restricting certain risky
activities that are not in themselves immoral, those who show themselves to be capable of sufficiently mitigating the associated risk should be allowed to partake in
said activities. Since we are assuming that there is a prima facie right to own a gun, it is incumbent upon
the state or licensing authority to provide a reason to override the rights of prospective gun owners.
Indeed, having a prima facie right to do something means that can one freely pursue some activity without having to justify his reason for doing so. Requiring
someone to justify his [her] reasons for exercising a right defeats the very purpose of having said
right. For example, requiring someone to justify invoking his 5th Amendment right to not self-incriminate would defeat the purpose of having that right, for in the
very act of doing so one makes statements that may be used against him. Rights function as reasons in themselves, such that their
possession grants immunity from having to give further justificatory reasons.xvii By putting the
burden of proof on all prospective gun owners to justify their need to own a gun, it is assumed that
their prima facie right to own a gun is either non-existent or already overridden.
AT Critiques
Soft Left Good
In the depoliticized climate, education must be a site that energizes agency towards
material social change; they inform the struggle for power in our real lives.
Giroux 5: (Henry A. Giroux, The Conservative Assault on America: Cultural Politics, Education and the new authoritarianism BERG
2005 PRINTED IN THE UK//FT)
Abstracted from the ideal of public commitment, the new authoritarianism represents a political and economic practice and form of
militarism that loosensthe connection between substantive democracy, critical agency, and critical
education. Against this rising tide of authoritarianism, [thus] educators must make a case for linking learning to social
change, pluralizing and critically engaging the diverse sites where public pedagogy takes place. They must also make clear that every sphere
of social life is open to political contestation and constitutes a crucial site of political, social and cultural struggle in the attempt to forge the
knowledge, identifications, affective investments and social relations that constitute a political subject and social agent capable of energizing and
spreading the basis of a global radical democracy. Educators need to [and] develop a new discourse as part of a broader,
sustained attempt to develop a democratic politics and pedagogy that combine the legacy of social
justice, equality, freedom and rights associated with the democratic concerns of history, space, plurality, power, discourse, [and]
identities, morality, and the future. Under such circumstances, pedagogy must be embraced as a moral and political
practice, one that is both directive and the outgrowth of struggles designed to resist the increasing
depoliticization of political culture that is the hallmark of the current Bush revolution. Education is the terrain where
consciousness is shaped, needs are constructed, and the capacity for self-reflection and social change is nurtured
and produced. Education has assumed an unparalleled significance in shaping the language, values, and ideologies that legitimate the
structures and organizations that support the imperatives of global capitalism. Rather than being simply a technique or
methodology, education has become a crucial site for the production of and struggle over those pedagogical and
political conditions that allow people to believe it is possible to develop forms of agency that enable them to
intervene individually and collectively in the processes through which the material relations of power shape the meaning and
practices of their everyday lives. Within the current historical context, struggles over power take on a
symbolic and discursive as well as a material and institutional form. The struggle over education is about more than the
struggle over meaning and identity; it is also about how meaning, knowledge and values are produced, legitimated,
and operate within economic and structural relations of power.
Were NOT THE LAW OR STATE AFFIRMATION demands that a state not
exclude groups doesnt reaffirm the state
Saul Newman 10, Reader in Political Theory at Goldsmiths, U of London, Theory & Event Volume 13,
Issue 2
There are two aspects that I would like to address here. Firstly, the
notion of demand: making certain demands on the
state say for higher wages, equal rights for excluded groups, to not go to war, or an end to draconian policing is one of
the basic strategies of social movements and radical groups. Making such demands does not
necessarily mean working within the state or reaffirming its legitimacy. On the contrary, demands are
made from a position outside the political order, and they often exceed the question of the
implementation of this or that specific measure. They implicitly call into question the legitimacy and
even the sovereignty of the state by highlighting fundamental inconsistencies between, for
instance, a formal constitutional order which guarantees certain rights and equalities, and state
practices which in reality violate and deny them.
Governmental policies are uniquely key. Institutional approaches are crucial to
effectively challenge the flawed state policies.
Lawrence Grossberg 92 [Morris Davis Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, We Gotta Get Out of this
Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture, page 388-389 ]
The demand for moral and ideological purity often results in the rejection of any hierarchy or organization. The
question-can the master's tools be used to tear down the master's house?-ignores both the contingency of the relation
between such tools and the master's power and, even more importantly, the fact that there may be no other tools available.
Institutionalization is seen as a repressive impurity within the body politic rather than as a strategic and tactical, even
empowering, necessity. It sometimes seems as if every progressive organization is condemned to recapitulate
the same arguments and crisis, often leading to their collapse. 54 For example, Minkowitz has described a crisis in
Act Up over the need for efficiency and organization, professionalization and even hierarchy,55 as if these inherently contradicted its
commitment to democracy. This is particularly unfortunate since Act Up, whatever its limitations, has proven itself an effective and imaginative
political strategist. The problems are obviously magnified with success, as membership, finances and activities grow. This refusal of efficient
operation and the moment of organization is intimately connected with the Left's appropriation and privileging of the local (as the site of
democracy and resistance). This is yet another reason why structures of alliance are inadequate, since they often assume
that an effective movement can be organized and sustained without such structuring. The Left needs to
recognize the necessity of institutionalization and of systems of hierarchy, without falling back into its own authoritarianism. It needs to
find reasonably democratic structures of institutionalization, even if they are impure and compromised.
We know the critique is important --- _____ is bad --- but simply asking the world to
reorient against constructs they once thought were ethical is utopian --- we need to
question how pragmatic options can help us make those changes.
Birkeland 95 (Janis, is an author and works at Centre for Environmental Philosophy, Planning and Design, U. of Canberra,
Disengendering Ecofeminism, (1995), http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/view/302/450, Accessed: 7/22, SD)
In the desire to displace gender as a pivotal element in her theory, Plumwood appears to overlook the central role of both sex and gender in the motivations behind the seeking and abusing power. For example, in Plumwood's
Power and dominance are not really

extensive deconstruction of the master-slave relationship, the power drive on the part of the master is presumed but not theorised.
defined; they just present themselves as something that pervades human relationships. Perhaps this is because power
cannot be adequately deconstructed in a gender-blind and a-sexual analysis? Surely humans have many biological and instinctual behaviour patterns related to sex and reproduction that they share with a mix of other animals, though
we are not as yet able to disentangle these phenomena. In Plumwood's theory, however, the human appears connected to nature on the cerebral plane only, either by experiencing nature existentially or by understanding nature
intellectually. In her disengendered theory, the human is a creature without sex drives or personal insecurities, moved only by cerebral constructs and sensory experience. But is this not a denial of the nature within? I for one find it
It seems unlikely that power relations

hard to believe that the power drive we witness daily does not predate the introduction of rational logic in ancient Greece, as is implied.
originated in modes of reason or that they can be extirpated by new conceptualisations alone. This begs the question as to
the strategic impact of a disengendered ecofeminism. Can people be motivated to abandon relations of personal power, and the value
systems that legitimise them, because new cerebral constructs are presented which should be preferred by
rational people? Ironically, Plumwood's model of the human is, in this respect, not that unlike the rational
information processor of traditional management and decision theory who makes optimal choices
based on objective analyses. Have not many malestream green theorists already articulated the view that the remedy to dominance relations or mastery is a new way of perceiving reality? It may
indeed be a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient. Rational arguments and intellectual frameworks are important, but if we
want to motivate people to take on board these new insights, we need to recognize the human as a
complex blending of emotional needs as well as ideologies. In a power-based society, or `patriarchy', many people feel they
can only ensure the provision of personal needs (such as sex, love and belonging) through material accumulation and the display of wealth. Until we face the problem of hyper-masculine identification in the self and the culture, I
suspect that there will be no fundamental social change. Were the masculine identity delinked from power, and the feminine identity delinked from submission and self-sacrifice, the basis of personal relationships could begin to
change from dominance to reciprocity.
The role of the ballot should be to endorse a policy action that addresses a societal
problem.
Bryant 12 (Levi Bryant, [Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. In addition to working as a professor, Bryant has also served as a
Lacanian psychoanalyst. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, where he originally studied 'disclosedness' with the
Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan. Bryant later changed his dissertation topic to the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze], Critique of
the Academic Left, http://larvalsubject...-academic-left/. FT)
the academic falls prey to
Unfortunately, left abstraction. Its good at
its own form of carrying out critiques yet
that denounce various social formations, very
poor at proposing realistic any sort of constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures ,
would have to be remade

or regimes of attraction to create a workable alternative. Here Im reminded by the underpants gnomes depicted in South Park: The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: Phase 1:
[their] plan [is]

Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work: Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our seems to be as follows: Phase 1: Ultra-
Radical Critique Phase 3: complete social transformation!
Phase 2: ? Revolution and without
Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1
ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2 . Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we
Even [if] these critiques

have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. though
are right, we express them in ways only

often a PhD in critical theory can that an academic with and post-structural theory
understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhDs in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David
we publish our work in expensive academic journals

Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, that only universities can afford, with presses that dont have a wide distribution, and
give our talks at conferences attended only by other academics. who are these things
expensive hotels at academic Again,
for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear[s] it, it doesnt make a sound! Seriously dudes
and dudettes, what are you doing? But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they dont embrace every
bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party
system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of revolutionary is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These
We never make concrete proposals

are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done! But this isnt where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. almost
for what infrastructures

for how things ought to be restructured, [are] need[ed] our critique-
new material and semiotic fields to be produced, and when we do,
intoxicated cynics immediately jump in with all the ways

and skeptics these things contain an analysis of in which dirty secrets,
ugly motives, and are doomed to fail 6 billion people . How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion people. These
are dependent on a network certain of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of
How will you meet these problems?

paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc. What are your proposals? How will you navigate the
Marx had proposals. Do you?

existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure? we are so and Lenin Have you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today
intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even
proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization. Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned
economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (theres a reason that it was the Negri & Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement). At
least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists. Were not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another
critical paradigm, Laruelle. I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound. How would he provide for the energy needs of that school? How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound way?
How would she provide food for the students? What would be her plan for waste disposal? And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature, the federal government, and all the families of these students? What is your plan? What is your alternative? I think
If you want to make contribution, this is where you should start.

there are alternatives. I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam. a truly revolutionary
Why should anyone listen you if you arent proposing real plans?
even bother Instead
ing to But we havent even gotten to that point.
were like underpants gnomes, saying revolution is the answer! without addressing any of the
infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would concretely go about building those alternatives. Masturbation. Underpants gnome deserves to be a category in critical
We need less critique not because critique isnt important

theory; a sort of synonym for self-congratulatory masturbation. but we or necessary it is because
know the critiques Were intoxicated with critique because its easy
, we know the problems. We best every and safe.
opponent with critique. But do we really do anything with critique? What we

We occupy a position of moral superiority with critique.
need is carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong.

today, more than ever, composition or Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them. Even the Tea Party
None of us, however, are proposing alternatives. Instead we

knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory.
prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that.

AT Rebellion/Fight Against State
Youre argument is historically misinformed every instance of black insurrection
with guns only empowered anti-black structures.
Everitt 10: [Ladd Everitt, Director of Communications at the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Debunking the gun control is racist
smear, Waging Non-Violence, 2010] VM
Thomas also refers to Nat Turner, a Virginian slave and preacher who staged a rebellion to seek
Gods judgment against the institution of slavery. The revolt began on the night of August 13, 1831, when Turner and six of his
followers went from house to house killing slave owners and their families with a hatchet and a broad axe. At each house, the rebels freed any slaves
they encountered and stocked up on more weapons. Eventually, his force numbered 60 menall
armed with guns, axes, swords and clubs. The revolt lasted nearly 10 days and 57 whites were killed before the group was pushed back by
militia and federal forces. Although Turner escaped, he was caught two months later, immediately convicted,
and hanged. In Virginia, the retribution was brutal: A reign of terror followed in Virginia. Labor
was paralyzed, plantations abandoned, women and children were driven from home and crowded
into nooks and corners. The sufferings of many of these refugees who spent night after night in the woods were intense. Retaliation began. In a
little more than one day 120 Negroes were killed One individual boasted that he himself had
killed between ten and fifteen Negroes Negroes were tortured to death, burned, maimed and
subjected to nameless atrocities. Thomas himself tells us the broader consequences of Turners exercise of Second Amendment rights: The
fear generated by these and other rebellions led southern legislatures to take particularly vicious
aim at the rights of free blacks and slaves to speak or to keep and bear arms for their defense. The
Colfax Massacre is another tragedy frequently cited by the majority in McDonald.Colfax actually began as a civil rights success story. During the Reconstruction
period, African-Americans in the small Louisiana town elected officeholders, held important public positions, and even organized a state militia company led by a
black man, William Ward. Eventually, however, their unit was demobilized after moving too aggressively to arrest white terrorists. A withdrawal of federal
government support set the stage for the massacre on April 13, 1873, when between 62-81 African Americansmore than half of them armed with firearmswere
slaughtered by a larger, better-equipped force of whites. As my boss, CSGV Executive Director Josh Horwitz, and Casey Anderson put it, according to gun
rights activists: the collapse of Reconstructionand every tragic consequence that followed
could have been avoided if the newly freed slaves had had access to firearms . This explanation of
events is a fantasy. It is easyto identify incidents where the victim of racist violence might have defended themselves more effectively if they had been
armed with guns. The idea that white racists could have been kept in check by ensuring widespread access
to firearms among black southerners, however, is absurd. In fact, the American experience during and after Reconstruction
illustrates that thepremisethat private ownership of guns safeguards individual rights against
tyranny of the majority is exactly backward in explaining the relationship between private force
and state power in protecting individual rights Not only is the claim that gun rights could have
stopped the Jim Crow system a falsehood, but it covers up the even more important insight that
[this argument] is a continuation of a concerted effort, born and nurtured in the antebellum South,
to limit the federal governments effectiveness in protecting the democratic rights of the most
vulnerable Americans. I cant help but think of Lifetime National Rifle Association (NRA) Member Rand Pauladvocating for the repeal of a section of
the 1964 Civil Rights Act and stating that gun carriers should be a protected class like minorities. Nor could Reclaim the Dream rally organizer Rev. Al Sharpton
when he recently referred to Paul while noting that Kings life work was conducted for the precise purpose of pushing for increased federal action and involvement to
nullify all discriminatory state and local practices.
Dropbox Evidence Compilation
Advocacies
General Ban
The current political climate has made banning hand guns seem impossible --- other
methods are insufficient a ban is feasible and must implemented.
VPC, (Violence Policy Center, Why America Needs to Ban Handguns, Copyrighted 2000, http://www.vpc.org/studies/unsafe.htm//FT)
The Politics Of Gun Control Obsessed with its search for "common sense" gun control and ever fearful of being perceived as radical, most
of the
American gun control movement has given up on trying to ban[ning] handguns. This has helped
create the notion that support for a ban is absent or marginal. However, polling data taken over the
past 20 years have consistently shown that more than 30 percent of the public favor a handgun ban
with this support ranging at times between 40 percent and 45 percent (even hitting 50 percent in one 1999 poll).41
Nonetheless, many in the gun control movement insist on ignoring the existence of this significant bloc of American voters. An objection continually raised to gun
control is that the Second Amendment to the Constitution somehow forbids it. This is pure myth. No gun control law has ever been overturned by the U.S. Supreme
Court on Second Amendment grounds.42 Federal bans on machine guns as well as city ordinances banning handgun possession have remained on the books for
decadesdespite vigorous court challenges. For all its posturing, the National Rifle Association has been reluctant to bring its Second Amendment arguments into
court. (The last time it did so was in an attempt to overturn the 1981 Morton Grove, Illinois, handgun ban; the organization was roundly rejected on both the federal
and state levels.)43 If
Congress or individual states want to ban handguns, they can do so constitutionally
all they need is the will. Gun Control Laws Why has more than 30 years of federal gun control legislation
[has] failed to slow the carnage? This is in large measure due to the ad hoc nature in which gun
control legislation has been enacted often in response to specific acts of violence. Effective
legislation must take into account the following Most victims know their killers and are often
related to them. Criminals often get their guns through gun stores and are skilled in evading point-
of-purchase legal roadblocks. The secondary gun marketi.e.,the selling of guns at gun shows or
over the Internetis in reality totally unregulated. It is the self-defense handgun purchased by
"law-abiding" citizens that ends up being used in most handgun violence. Politicians and gun
control advocates alike, however, have a tendency to proffer the same legislative remedies over and
over ("licensing and registration" or "background checks") without consideration of these
fundamentals or inquiry into the actual effects such laws might have on reducing firearms violence
overall. A contrasting legislative approach to curtailing gun violence begins with the recognition that the firearms industry remains the last unregulated
manufacturer of a consumer product. Guns are the only consumer product in America specifically exempted from federal health and safety requirements. The firearms
industry maintains this regulatory immunity despite the fact that their products kill more Americans every year than all household and recreational products combined.
To end this era of national denial, Congress should vest the Department of the Treasury with strong authority to regulate the design, manufacture, and distribution of
firearms. Such authority should include the ability to remove from the market firearms that pose a serious threat to public health and safety. In every other part of the
consumer economy we have long recognized that the damage wrought by some products can be controlled only by an unequivocal ban. Products such as three-wheel
ATVs and lawn darts had related death rates microscopic in comparison to handguns, but were nevertheless banned. Also, under federal regulation, products ranging
from cribs to automobiles have undergone major structural alterations to minimize inherent dangers. Firearms and particularly handguns are long overdue to receive
the same regulatory scrutiny. Ifa handgun ban were enacted, what should be done about the existing supply of
some 65 million civilian-owned handguns? Could the nation [could] afford to eliminate them
through a program? Since many handguns began as cheap "junk guns," a generous estimate of the
average buy-back price would be $250. The total tab would be about $16.25 billion, which is slightly more than
three SSN-21 nuclear attack submarines.44 Considering that by conservative estimates [that] America spends $4
billion annually on medical care for gun violence victims, the cost of a buy-back could be recouped
in a few years. A clear-cut plan to ban handguns should be developed and implemented soon.
Considering the many thousands who are killed or maimed by the handgun each year, how much
more motivation do we need?
The USFG should ban the private ownership of handguns and if necessary amend
the constitution to do so. Ensley 15
Gerard Ensley, Tallahassee Democrat, Stop the insanity: Ban Guns, January 7, 2015,
http://www.tallahassee.com/story/opinion/columnists/ensley/2014/11/22/stop-insanity-ban-guns/19426029/
The shootings Thursday at the Florida State University library. The shootings Saturday in a northwest Tallahassee neighborhood. The shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
The shooting of Arizona U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The shootings at Virginia Tech. The 10,000 senseless shooting deaths that happen every
year in this country. Take away guns and they don't happen. How is it that the supposed greatest nation on earth refuses to stop the unholy
availability of guns? I'm not talking about gun control. I'm not talking about waiting periods and background checks. I'm talking about flat-out banning the
possession of handguns and assault rifles by individual citizens. I'm talking about repealing or amending the Second
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Second Amendment has been misinterpreted. It says guns are
permitted to a "well-regulated militia." That means trained citizen soldiers called into action for
emergencies because in colonial times every able-bodied man was required to be a member of the militia. It does not mean everyone with $50 and a
driver's license is entitled to own a gun.
Young Adults
In the United States, private ownership of handguns by people ages 18 to 20 ought
to be banned.
NYT 10 [its the new york times] Handguns for 18-Year-Olds?, The New York Times, 25 Nov 2010]
Beyond the dubious legal claims, the idea that young individuals ages 18 to 20 have a constitutional right to
buy weapons and carry them loaded and concealed in public is breathtakingly irresponsible. Young
people in that age range commit a disproportionate amount of gun violence. F.B.I. crime data from 2009 shows
arrests for murder, nonnegligent homicides and other violent crimes peaking from ages 18 to 20. That age group accounts for
about 5 percent of the population but nearly 20 percent of homicide and manslaughter arrests, and
nearly twice the number of such arrests for those ages 30 to 34, according to the F.B.I. figures. What the N.R.A.
should be doing is keeping our streets and our teenagers safer by working to extend the prohibition on guns sales to people 18 to 20 years old by
licensed dealers to include unlicensed sellers at gun shows and elsewhere.
Domestic Violence
Plan Text: The United States Federal Government should ban private ownership of
handguns for domestic abusers in a current or former dating relationship.
Stachelberg, Winnie, Arkadi Gerney, Chelsea Parsons, and Megan Knauss. "Preventing Domestic Abusers and Stalkers from Accessing Guns." Center for American
Progress. N.p., 9 May 2013. Web.

The federal prohibition on gun ownership by domestic-violence perpetrators overlooks a key group
of perpetrators that pose a potential risk to public safety: individuals convicted of a domestic-
violence misdemeanor or subject to a restraining order because of conduct committed against a
current or former dating partner. The precise nature of the relationship between a perpetrator of domestic violence and the
victim should not control whether the individual is banned from gun ownership, but dating relationships are not currently included
in the law. That the parties were never married, never lived together, or do not have a child together does not lessen the risk of future gun
violence that Congress has already recognized is posed by perpetrators of domestic violence. The shootings of Anastasia Glinisty
and Michelle Fischer by their ex-boyfriends are clear examples. Five states have enacted legislation prohibiting
individuals convicted of misdemeanor domestic-violence crimes against current or former dating partners from gun ownership. Nineteen states
have also banned gun possession by individuals subject to a domestic-violence restraining order against a current or former dating partner. Now
Congress should amend the federal law to include domestic abusers in a current or former dating
relationship among those prohibited from buying or possessing firearms. Congress should also
strengthen the protections for domestic-violence victims by expanding the law to prohibit
individuals subject to a temporary restraining order from possessing guns.
Solvency/Advantages
1ar race framework
Our framework precedesonly deliberation under equal conditions mandates all
people have equal access to power in the first placemy argument isnt that racism
isnt bad, its that we should frame that through the lens of freedom to deliberate
since its key to make a positive change in society.
Community, deliberative focus is key to solve racismcrime scholarship proves.
Jonathan Simon 2 [Associate Dean of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Boalt Hall School of Law at University of California,
Berkeley], Crime, Community, and Criminal Justice, California Law Review, Volume 90 | Issue 5, October 2002, BE
Crime offers a harsh and inflexible model of governance at a moment when other trends from globalization to lifestyle diversity and the rise of
information economies, require a higher capacity to consider the context of individual action. Like cancer, crime
is often a pathology
so feared that harsh measures are necessary regardless of whether those measures are realistically
likely to benefit the patient or how severe the collateral effects on the body. Once crime is defined as
the central problem for communities, the defensive measures taken almost always drive up the cost
of performing other kinds of conflict resolution. Once conflicting parties are defined as offender and victim, institutions
are pushed into roles ofjudge, prosecu- tor, or police officer that rarely reflect their expertise and often exclude functional mechanisms of
integration and order maintenance. Perhaps
the new scholarship on community and criminal justice, which the
essays in this Colloquium represent a major contribution to, can
begin a much-needed counter-discourse that will
reinfuse community legal landscapes with a fuller set of social values than crime control, including
equality, economic revitalization, and social solidarity. By its very position between individual actors and society as a
whole, community complicates our dominant crime narratives. As Tracey Meares reminds us in her contribution to
this volume, the space of community has long been a space for reimagining how law enforcement, community leaders, and others might act on
and know crime in ways different than the traditional punitive criminal law."5 Shifting
the practice of criminal-justice
institutions and policies in ways that address community opportunities for crime control will
require convincing new narratives for crime-control institutions themselves. 9 Three of the Essays here
provide quite different directions for theorizing a community logic of criminal justice.
1ar police
Guns at protests spark violent reactions and police militarization.
Firmin DeBrabander 15 [associate professor of philosophy at Maryland Institute College of Art, has written social and political
commentary for numerous publications, including the Baltimore Sun, Common Dreams, Counterpunch, and the New York Times] Do Guns
Make Us Free?: Democracy and the Armed Society, Yale University Press, 19 May 2015, BE
This leads to another reason guns are inimical to protest: they might incite police to react roughly,
as has happened many times in the past, even when rallies were nominally or largely peaceful. What if
the protesters had been armed at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 where police, goaded by the defiant mayor, were already
itching for a confrontation or in Seattle in 2000, when police battled anarchists smashing store windows? What if the Occupy Wall Street
protesters had stashed guns in their tents before the New York City Police Department descended on Zuccotti Park to disband their encampment?
We cannot imagine guns in each of these cases because the police never would have allowed such protests in the first place. Police
typically justify rough treatment of protesters by saying the latter had become unruly, violent,
abusive, and posed a threat to the larger community. In many cities in 2011, police departments broke up Occupy camps
on the grounds that they were becoming dangerous. Guns in the hands of protesters only strengthen the polices case
for subduing protest. Further, consider the prospect of armed protesters in the face of our increasingly
militarized police. Many observers of the Occupy movement commented on the militaristic approach taken by police, especially in
disbanding the protests. A New York Times article entitled When the Police Go Military offered a summation: Riot police officers tear-
gassing protesters at the Occupy movement in Oakland, Calif. The surprising nighttime invasion of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, carried
out with D-Day like secrecy by officers deploying klieg lights and a military-style sound machine. And campus police officers in helmets and
face shields dousing demonstrators at the University of California Davis with pepper spray. 89 The article went on to say that such actions stem
from years of police department build-up during the War on Terror. Facing the possibility of a domestic terror attack and showered with money
from the Department of Homeland Security, police departments across the country have bulked up on military
gear even in small towns and shown greater readiness to employ SWAT teams for all manner of incidents, including nonviolent protests.
90 In his book The Democracy Project, activist David Graeber writes of the anomalous presence of a SWAT team at a small Occupy protest soon
after the Zuccotti Park sweep. Cato Institute fellow Timothy Lynch complains of an increasingly militaristic mind-set among police, apparent
in the way they search and raid homes and the way they deal with the public. 91 Lynch goes on to explain that the more police fail to defuse
confrontations but instead help create them be it with their equipment, tactics or demeanor the more ties with community members are
burned. The effect is a loss of civility, and an erosion of constitutional rights, rather than a building of good will. 92 The journalist Radley
Balko quotes a New Hampshire resident critical of his towns plan to purchase a BearCat (a kind of armored vehicle) for its police department: It
promotes violence. We should promote more human interaction rather than militarize. 93 A militarized police, according to Lynch, endangers
civility on both sides. Sending a SWAT team to a nonviolent, gun-free protest is an uncivil gesture by the police; it is an expression of deep
suspicion. At the very least, it is a demonstrative threat to the protesters not to get out of hand or, as Graeber argues, if the protesters are
obviously peaceful, a SWAT team is a heavy-handed attempt to threaten them into protesting less vocally or just less. Further, as Lynch
suggests, militarized police are more likely to create than defuse confrontation. It is difficult to imagine how
armed protesters, in the face of a SWAT team, could make the situation better for the protesters and uphold their right to speech. An armed
protest facing a SWAT team is a combustible mixture; the
presence of guns provides a perfect excuse for the police
to crack down. Police were happy to disperse Occupy camps on far lesser grounds, including supposed
public health threats. Imagine what they would do in the face of AR-15s. Even if they did not physically confront armed protesters, what would
protest look like under those circumstances? I cant imagine that it would be anything we could describe as free. To the contrary, it would be
unbearably tense, electric, and ultimately muted as a result of the weaponry. But of course, police would outlaw protest in the first place, if
protesters were armed. We
can only exercise the right of assembly if assembly is nonviolent. When guns are
present, especially among protesters, both assembly and free speech quickly vanish.
1ar check state
Theres no way that guns help fight the state.
Make Us Free?: Democracy and the Armed Society, Yale University Press, 19 May 2015, CC
Some gun rights extremists apparently believe they can wage guerilla warfare against this historically
well-armed government. A popular article making this argument, noting that the North Vietnamese held off the U.S. military by just such means, is daringly titled Armed
Revolution Possible and Not So Difficult. 78 I believe that the Vietnamese, who know intimately the devastation wrought by that war, would hardly call their experience not so difficult. It
is a preposterous claim that, to the extent that it proves anything, demonstrates only the amazing abstractness of
violence in our society that permits some to invite insurrection and war in the streets as if it were a
good idea. Stanley Fish, writing about an online article on the signs of imminent tyranny, reports that one of the commentators to the article declared Secession is near. Cant wait. 79
How can the commenter say this seriously, unless he is oblivious to the real implications of civil
war? Unless he is spoiled by the very rule of law and takes it for granted? The journalist Dan Baum encounters this argument when he visits the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix. When he
expresses doubt that a bunch of guys with rifles in their closets could topple the U.S. military, the institutes director eagerly declares that Vietnam is the defining war of your lifetime, and the
mighty U.S. military was defeated by an enemy with little more than rifles. Our two current wars [in Afghanistan and Iraq] are much the same, and neither is looking good. And look at the
Is guerilla warfare possible? Perhaps,

Russians in Afghanistan. Dont tell me that people with nothing but rifles cant take on a modern military. 80
but only with tremendous bloodshed, hardship, pain, and devastation. And the suffering had better be clearly warranted.
Guerilla warfare succeeds to the extent that it has popular backing and justification. The Vietnamese would never have tolerated the suffering of their war against the U.S. had they not seen the
Viet Cong as fighting for their independence. Afghanis were willing to endure the immense suffering of their war against the Soviet Union because they supported the mujahedeens cause.
Guerilla warfare is indeed possible, but so very extreme and difficult that it is advisable only as a last resort, where the situation is so dire that such combat is warranted by, for example, the
invasion of an occupying army. It is hardly clear that the situation in the United States is so dire, and the public so galvanized against tyrannical forces, that guerilla warfare has any chance of
succeeding here. Furthermore, the Goldwater director reveals a certain navet. It was not merely by virtue of rifles literal physical, military force that the Viet Cong defeated the U.S.
military or the Afghanis ousted the Russians. There were other elements to the battle nonviolent elements that arguably were more powerful than military efforts. In the case of Vietnam, for
example, public support for American involvement flagged considerably as the war dragged on and its justification became less clear and the American media, for the first time, transmitted
into living rooms frank and unadulterated images of the war. Our energies for this difficult campaign were greatly sapped by increasing disbelief in its justification. We should, of course, be
300 million guns in

concerned that our government might turn tyrannical. And we should be worried that if it does, it has the most powerful military on earth at its disposal. But
the hands of a motley assortment of individuals will not depose such tyranny or deter our ruling
class from amassing power especially since the public at large is hardly united against tyrannical
government. Yet gun rights advocates inadvertently raise an important question here, which I will take up in the final chapter: what would equivalent force look like today? What
power at the peoples disposal would be sufficient to hold a tyrannical government in check or, better yet, prevent it from emerging in the first place?
1ar race generic
1] Minorities are disproportionately the targets of handgun violence the AFF is
key to solve.
PRC 13 Pew Research Center, Blacks Suffer Disproportionate Share of Firearm Homicide Deaths, 2013. NS
In 2010, there were 31,672 deaths in the U.S. from firearm injuries, mainly through suicide (19,392) and homicide (11,078), according to CDC
compilation of data from death certificates. Among racial and ethnic groups, blacks
are over-represented among gun
homicide victims; blacks were 55% of shooting homicide victims in 2010, but 13% of the population. By
contrast, whites are underrepresented; whites were 25% of the victims of gun homicide in 2010, but 65% of
the population. For Hispanics, the 17% share of gun homicide victims was about equal to their 16% proportion of the total population.
Risk of a violent death in the US increases with the purchase of handguns.

Lemieux 14, Frederick. [Professor and Director of Police Science and Security & Safety Leadership Programs, College of Professional
Studies, The George Washington University ] "Effect of Gun Culture and Firearm Laws on Gun Violence and Mass Shootings in the United
States: A Multi-Level Quantitative Analysis." International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences Vol. 9 (1) (2014): n. pag. Open Access, 2014.
Web. 29 June 2015. http://www.sascv.org/ijcjs/pdfs/Lemieuxijcjs2014vol9issue1.pdf.
Also, two US studies show that the legal purchase of handguns increases the risk of violent deaths. More
precisely for both suicides and homicides, the elevated relative risks persisted for more than 5 years
after the purchase (Cummings and al. 1997). The second study shows that individuals in possession of a gun were 4.46
(p<0.05) times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not in possession of a gun. On average, guns did not protect
those who possessed them from being shot in an assault (Branas et al., 2009). Finally, a study on homicide and
geographical access to gun dealers in the United States shows that the prevalence of federal firearms licensee stores
is strongly correlated with homicide rates in major cities but not so much at the county or town levels (Wiebe et al., 2009).
2] Non-unique they already enforce gun lawseven if theyre already unequally

enforced, we should do something that helps everyone.
3] gun ban in the US solves global violence.
John J. Fendrock 13,The Second Amendment in the 21st Century: FIREARMS IN SOCIETY - A BLESSING OR A CURSE ?, Xlibris
Corporation, 19 Apr 2013, BE
With the new Constitution the United States was recognized as having lit the torch of liberty and
freedom that, to this day, people in every corner of the world work at approximating. This Document despite
shortcomings that still exist is recognized as the greatest, most enlightened Document conceived by man for the self-governance of his fellow men. A State of mind
that has persisred for these two-plus centuries. Those high ideals will eventually be reached as the American public becomes enlightened as to what is missing in their
lives. Now, the country has an opportunity to light another beacon for the advancement of civilization.
Is it that difficult to visualize a world devoid of instruments of death in the possession of every individual passing one by
on the street or sitting next to them in a vehicle of transportation? America can lead the world to being a better safer and more
congenial place to live. The effect of the proposal of depriving society of the right to possess arms
would immediately reduce the production of guns-firearms and eliminate the country as the worlds
supplier of those instruments of death. Other nations would follow suit. And. since we have been learning from our
past experience in allowing special interest groups to delay the incorporation of the rights and privileges of individuals, regardless of their position in society, change
could be accelerated and the world made a better and safer place in relatively short order. America has the opportunity to lead the
world upward on the ladder of civilization. That opportunity must be grasped and brought about without delay.
AT: Race DA - Minority Violence
Minorities are disproportionately the targets of handgun violence the plan is key
to solve.
PRC 13 Pew Research Center, Blacks Suffer Disproportionate Share of Firearm Homicide Deaths, 2013. NS
In 2010, there were 31,672 deaths in the U.S. from firearm injuries, mainly through suicide (19,392) and homicide (11,078), according to CDC
compilation of data from death certificates. Among racial and ethnic groups, blacks
are over-represented among gun
homicide victims; blacks were 55% of shooting homicide victims in 2010, but 13% of the population. By
contrast, whites are underrepresented; whites were 25% of the victims of gun homicide in 2010, but 65% of
the population. For Hispanics, the 17% share of gun homicide victims was about equal to their 16% proportion of the total population.
Risk of a violent death in the US increases with the purchase of handguns.

Lemieux 14, Frederick. [Professor and Director of Police Science and Security & Safety Leadership Programs, College of Professional
Studies, The George Washington University ] "Effect of Gun Culture and Firearm Laws on Gun Violence and Mass Shootings in the United
States: A Multi-Level Quantitative Analysis." International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences Vol. 9 (1) (2014): n. pag. Open Access, 2014.
Web. 29 June 2015. http://www.sascv.org/ijcjs/pdfs/Lemieuxijcjs2014vol9issue1.pdf.
Also, two US studies show that the legal purchase of handguns increases the risk of violent deaths. More
precisely for both suicides and homicides, the elevated relative risks persisted for more than 5 years
after the purchase (Cummings and al. 1997). The second study shows that individuals in possession of a gun were 4.46
(p<0.05) times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not in possession of a gun. On average, guns did not protect
those who possessed them from being shot in an assault (Branas et al., 2009). Finally, a study on homicide and
geographical access to gun dealers in the United States shows that the prevalence of federal firearms licensee stores
is strongly correlated with homicide rates in major cities but not so much at the county or town levels (Wiebe et al., 2009).
Generic
Handguns are uniquely detrimental to societal well-being --- studies point to
potential positive effects of the plan.
VPC, (Violence Policy Center, Why America Needs to Ban Handguns, Copyrighted 2000, http://www.vpc.org/studies/unsafe.htm//FT)
Introduction The United States [U.S.]
leads the industrialized world in firearms violence of all typeshomicides,
suicides, and unintentional deaths.1 Most of this violence involves the use of a handgun.2 Handguns
are easily concealed, engineered for maximum lethality, relatively inexpensive, and easy to acquire.
On average, handguns are used in nearly 70 percent of firearm suicides3 and 80 percent of firearm
homicides.4 The United States [U.S] has not so much a firearms problem as a handgun problem. The Toll of
Handgun Violence The call to ban handguns is not inspired by a generalized hatred of guns. It is a response to the blood price that our nation has paid for the
explosive growth of the handgun population over the past generation.5 More than two out of three of the one million Americans
who died in firearm-related homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings since 1962 were killed
with handgunsi.e., 667,000.6 This weapon, which has inflicted pain and death in such a disproportionate degree, is owned by a distinct minority of
Americansonly one out of six adults.7 Out of the current total firearms population of some 190 million, rifles and
shotguns outnumber handguns two to one, yet handguns account for the majority of killings,
woundings, and gun crimes. For example, of all firearm-related crimes in 1993, 86 percent involved
the use of a handgun.8 The modern handgun has been honed for decades by the firearms industry to
the highest possible level of lethality, just as race cars are continually redeveloped for maximum
speed. The handguns that have been introduced into the market in the past two decadesespecially high-caliber, high-capacity, semiautomatic pistolsmeet the
lethality standard admirably.9 The increased efficiency of the handgun as a killing machine is the result of a
strategy by the gun industry over the past decade and a half to boost sales.10 This growth in killing power is the
result of three variables deliberately designed into handguns Greater capacity, i.e. the ability to hold more bullets.11 Higher caliber, meaning bigger bullets.12
Increased concealability, facilitating criminal use.13 These variables reached their zenith with the recent introduction of "pocket rockets,"semiautomatic pistols in
Recent data reveal the effect of this decades-long trend. From
higher calibers that can be concealed in the palm of the hand.
1990 to 1997, of the 160,000 homicides committed in the United States, more than half (55.6 percent)
involved a handgun.14 This block of 89,000 handgun homicides is larger than that of all other
weapons used in homicides combined. As the debate over gun violence is almost always framed in
terms of fatalities, it is easy to overlook that, for every person killed with a firearm, approximately
three others require medical treatment for wounds inflicted with a gun.15 One conservative estimate
places the annual cost of immediate medical care for all gunshot wounds at $4 billion.16 Other
researchers take into account lifetime care and long-term economic loss, calculating the overall cost
of gun violence in any given year to be in excess of $20 billion.17 Statistics for the costs of handgun violence in particular are
not available. Nonetheless, since handguns cause the majority of firearm injuries, it follows that handgun injuries are responsible for the majority of firearm-related
expenses. There
are an estimated 65 million handguns in America.18 The deleterious impact of this large
handgun population on our murder rate becomes evident when making comparisons to countries
that strongly regulate private firearms ownership with an emphasis on minimizing access to
handguns. For example, in 1995 the U.S. firearms death rate was 13.7 per 100,000; in Canada 3.9
per 100,000; in Australia 2.9 per 100,000; and, in England and Wales it was 0.4 per 100,000.19 Contrary
to a common rationalization, the United States is not especially more violent than other "older" cultures; in fact, as Western Europe grows more violent, the U.S.
becomes less so.20 The main difference between those nations and our own is that we have more than 60 million handguns. The lesson to be learned from this is, as
one public health researcher stated: "People without guns injure people; guns kill them."21 The Handgun as Consumer Product The
mythology woven around the handgun by the gun lobby clouds the reality that a handgun is a consumer product that ought to be judged and regulated by the same
standards applied to all other products. However, the firearms industry is exempt from basic federal consumer product health and safety regulation. Aside from the
issuance of pro forma licenses for gun manufacturers and dealers, no federal agency has the authority to review the firearm industry's products in terms of their
relative costs and benefits.22 Using this cost/benefit standard, two reasonable and essential questions need to be posed about the handgun Is it innately dangerous to
the user or to anyone else? What does its use cost society in human and monetary terms in contrast to its beneficial applications? Indeed, by making a simple
comparison between the costs of civilian handgun ownership versus the benefits these weapons are purported to deliver, the case for banning handguns becomes self-
evident. For example, for every time in 1997 that a civilian used a handgun to kill in self-defense, 43 people lost their lives in handgun homicides alone.23 This passes
any point of rational justification for condoning the existence of such a product on the open market, especially in an unregulated state. Through
the use of
dubious methodologies, the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun advocates have created
wildly inflated numbers supposedly showing handguns to be an effective means of self defense .24
This claim is false. Although handguns are marketed primarily for their self-defense value,
bringing one into the home has exactly the opposite effect, placing residents at a much higher rate
of risk. A person living in a home with a gun is three times more likely to die by homicide25 and
five times more likely to die by suicide.26 Data from 1997 buttress the point that self-defense
handgun uses are rare. In that year there was A total of 15,690 homicides. Of these, 8,503 (54.2
percent) were committed with handguns, contrasted to 2,207 involving all other types of firearms (14.1 percent). Among
handgun homicides, only 193 (2.3 percent) were classified as justifiable homicides by civilians.27 For
decades handguns have been marketed and purchased as the strongest bulwark a law-abiding
citizen could have against a legion of dangerous strangers. However, of the 8,503 handgun
homicides in 1997, only 110 (1.3 percent) were justifiable killings of an assailant previously unknown to
the person using a handgun.28 Instances in which a person uses a handgun in self-defense against an unknown attacker do occur, but compared
against the total universe of gun crime and violence, they are extremely rare. Handguns are employed extensively in violent crimes
such as assaults and robberies. In 1993 there were about 1.3 million such crimes committed with a
firearm29and 86 percent of the time the weapon was a handgun. Conversely, an analysis of four years of National Crime
Victimization Survey (NCVS) data indicated that gun owners claim to defend themselves with a firearm of any type approximately 65,000 times in an average year
a minute percentage compared to the total figure for violent crime.30 Contrary to the National Rifle Association's standard portrayal of gun violence, most gun deaths
do not take place during the course of felony crime.31 Considering what the FBI has been reporting year in and year
outthat most homicides result from arguments between people who know each other32it is
clear that a handgun purchased for self-protection poses the gravest danger to the very person it is
supposed to protect. Suicide And Unintended Shootings Throughout the long and bitter debate over gun violence,
the fact that the largest number of gun deaths is suicides, not homicides, has been consistently
overlooked. For example, from 1990 to 1997 there were 147,000 suicides committed with a firearm
in contrast to 100,000 firearm homicides.33 An estimated 90,000 of these suicides were accomplished
with a handgun34a tribute to the operational simplicity and high lethality that make it the ideal
suicide machine. Perhaps because of a lingering sense of suicide as a shameful act, this calamitous
by-product of handgun ownership has been largely disregarded by even gun control advocates.
Obviously handguns by themselves do not make people suicidal. But their ready availability has
increased their use in suicide attempts and the use of a firearm all but guarantees that a suicide
attempt will end in a fatality.35 People living in a household with a gun are five times more likely to
commit suicide than those living in a gun-free home36and seven times out of 10 a handgun will be
their weapon of choice.37 The deadly link between handgun ownership and suicide was decisively
established in a 1999 study of California handgun purchasers showing that the suicide rate during
the first week after the purchase of a handgun is 57 times higher than for the population as a whole.
During the first year after purchase, suicide remained the leading cause of death among handgun
purchasers.38 In sharp contrast, unintentional shootings involving children, which receive the lion's share of media attention, actually generate the smallest
number of firearm deaths in any category. In 1997 there were 981 victims of unintentional shooting deaths, of whom
142 were aged 14 years old or younger.39 Regardless of the means, the violent death of a young
person is a catastrophe, but it is still important to note that, while 300 young people between the
ages of 15 years to 24 years old died in unintentional shootings in 1997, more than eight times as
many died in firearms suicides,40 most involving handguns.
Handgun bans reduce violent crime and suicides, empirically proven in D.C.
Stephen Manning, Associated Press Writer at USA Today, D.C. gun ban's effectiveness questioned, 3/14/20 08 5:11 PM;
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-03-14-4254021157_x.htm
The city's gun ban emerged from exasperation. Still reeling from the riots of 1968, the city saw violent
crime rise and residents flee to the suburbs. In 1974, two years before the ban took effect, more than half of all homicides were committed
with handguns. There were an estimated 22,000 registered gun owners in the city in 1976, but a Georgetown University poll found three out of four city residents supported the
bill. The law cleared the D.C. Council in a 12-1 vote and went on to survive both a court challenge by the National Rifle Association and efforts in Congress to scuttle it. "Handgun crimes were
The
just getting out of sight," said Sterling Tucker, D.C. Council chairman when the ban was enacted. "We had to isolate and contain the problem. We thought a handgun law would do that."
law bars private ownership of handguns, with exceptions for law enforcement officers and those who had
registered handguns before the ban took effect. Shotguns and rifles are legal, but must be disassembled or stored with trigger locks.
Homicides in the district did ebb over the next few years, largely following a national trend. In 1977, the U.S. Conference of Mayors
reported robberies, assaults and homicides using handguns had fallen sharply in D.C. and concluded the ban
was working. However, the results were challenged even by the city's police department, which said police tactics had contributed to the drop. In the late 1980s and
early 1990s, murders spiked as Washington, like many other cities, was hit by the crack epidemic. By 1991, the number of
homicides reached 479, or 81 deaths per 100,000 people, earning the city status as the nation's murder capital. Yet that year, a study released by University of
Maryland criminologists in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested the gun ban had saved lives in the decade
before. They argued the ban had prevented 47 deaths per year in D.C., both suicides and murders.
Surrounding areas in Maryland and Virginia had not seen a corresponding drop in gun crime.
Japans Model
Japans laws require extensive testing and background checks and have resulted in low crime rates.
Hickey, Walter. "How Australia And Other Developed Nations Have Put A Stop To Gun Violence." Business Insider. Business Insider, Inc, 15 Jan. 2013. Web. 29 June 2015.
<http://www.businessinsider.com/canada-australia-japan-britain-gun-control-2013-1>. KH 6/29/15
Japan's gun policies are notoriously strict. Civilians cannot possess handguns, automatic assault weapons, semi-automatic assault weapons, military rifles,
or machine guns. Japanese civilians aren't even allowed to own swords. Without a license, a Japanese citizen isn't even permitted to touch a firearm. Failure to follow this law can result in up to
Japanese civilians hold a mere 710,000 guns, with 0.6 firearms for every person. In 2008, there were 11 gun
10 years in prison.
homicides [with]. For perspective, there are 122,800,000 people in Japan. That year is not an anomaly. In 2006 there were 2 gun homicides
and in 2007 there were 22, a national scandal. What is legal are hunting rifles and shotguns, but those can only be
obtained after an exhaustive application process. An aspiring gun-toucher must first take an all-day class and pass both written and practical
exams. Then, applicants are required to go to the hospital for a mental health test, and provide police with a medical
certificate attesting their mental health and drug-free status. The police then investigate the
applicants ;background, relatives and group affiliations. Involvement in some political or activist
organizations is grounds for categorical denial of license application. Only after all that can a Japanese citizen buy a gun. Even then, gun-
owners are required to store the gun in a locker, store ammunition in a separate locked safe, and
provide for the police a map of the location of the locker, Gun owners must then submit to annual
inspections of the rifle or shotguns and retake the shooting range class and written exam every
three years.
Japans laws are effective
Asia Pacific Law Review, City Polytechnic of Hong Kong; David B . Kopel . Originally published as 2 Asia Pac. L. Rev. 26-52 (1993
). Director, Firearms Research Project,
Independence Institute, Golden, Colorado; Associate Policy Analyst, Cato Institute, Washington, DC; Technical Consultant, International Wound Ballistics Association, San Francisco,
California. This article is based on a chapter in the author's book The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Control of Other Democracies? KH 6/29/15
Tokyo is the safest major city in the world. Only 59,000 licensed gun owners live in Tokyo.[25] Per one million inhabitants, Tokyo has 40
reported muggings a year; New York has 11,000.[26] The handgun murder rate is at least 200 times
higher in America than Japan.[27] The official homicide rate in Japan in 1988 was 1.2 homicide cases per 100,000
population, while in America it was 8.4 homocide cases per 100,000.[28] Robbery is almost as rare as murder. Indeed, armed robbery and murder are both so rare that
they usually make the national news, regardless of where they occur.[29] Japan's robbery rate is 1.4 per 100,000 inhabitants. The reported American rate
is 220.9.[30] People walk anywhere in Japan at night, and carry large sums of cash.[31]
Misdemeanor
Prohibitions on misdemeanor crimes of violence empirically reduce violence by
those groups proved by similar policy in California. Webster et al 12
Webster, Daniel W., et al. "The case for gun policy reforms in America." Bulletin:
Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research Online (2012): 19-pages. CC
6/24/15
There has been very little research of high scientific quality that directly examines whether laws prohibiting individuals in high-risk groups from purchasing or
possessing firearms reduce criminal offending by prohibited individuals.57,58 One
study examined the impact of a California law
that expanded firearm prohibitions to include persons convicted of misdemeanor crimes of
violence. A study of legal handgun purchasers in California before and after the law found that
denial of firearm purchase applications by violent misdemeanants was associated with lower rates
of violence by this high-risk group.
Gun Culture
American gun culture has created an environment that pushes these individuals
towards crime.
OHara 13, (David L. O'Hara, Armed in Anxiety; What philosophy can tell us about guns, Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc., Feb.
15, 2013//FT)
What do guns do for us? Many opponents of new gun legislation argue that they make us safer. Proponents of gun control hope to promote public safety by keeping guns
out of the hands of bent young men who worship projectile power and senseless death. Most of our public policy debates about guns have focused on safety, but in my opinion, not enough has
been said about whether guns make us sound. Our word "safe" has roots in the Latin word salvus, which means not just "secure from harm" but "whole, well, and thriving"that is to say, sound.
This is one of philosophy's oldest concerns, to examine and foster this kind of sound, flourishing human life. This question is at the heart of Aristotle's ethics, for example. The opening lines of
his Nicomachean Ethics declare that it is possible to regard life as having a kind of excellence, a sense of human flourishing and wholeness to which all of our sciences contribute. As Aristotle
puts it, failure to reflect on this will make us like people who shoot without considering their target. (Yes, he really says that.) Part of what makes us continue to admire Plato and Aristotle is just
this confidence that it is possible to live a life oriented toward something that cannot be taken away from us. In Plato's Republic, Socrates mocks men like Herodicus who devote their lives to the
futile attempt to preserve their youth, health, and safety forever. Even if we don't know what the best goal of our lives ought to be, it seems foolish to strive for what we know we can never
achieve. Significantly, toward the end of his Ethics, Aristotle devotes several chapters to an examination of friendship or, as he calls it, philia, the Greek word for the love we have for our friends.
Now it's probably true that in many

After all, love and friendship seem strong candidates for qualities of life at its most excellent and most enduring.
circumstances guns make us safer, or at least make us feel safer, and that's not unimportant. But I do wonder
whether they make us better people, in the more enduring sense of being whole and well. I don't think that
question is easily answered. It's not hard to imagine someone developing great skill, selfcontrol, and confidence through targetshooting; many hunters know the land on which they hunt and the
food they shoot themselves in ways most of us never will; and the police officers who raised me regarded their guns as tools that helped them to make their communities better places. It's hard to
deny that there are people who bear arms in a disciplined way that contributes to their flourishing. But a passage from Kerouac's On the Road
offers another [a] possibility. Kerouac's protagonist Sal Paradise (Kerouac's fictionalized autobiographical persona) describes what it was like to be alone in San
Francisco, thousands of miles from home: Several times I went to San Fran with my gun and when a queer approached me in a bar john I took out the gun and said "Eh? Eh? What's that you
say?" He bolted. I've never understood why I did that; I knew queers all over the country. It was just the loneliness of San Francisco and the fact that I had a gun. I had to show it to someone. I
walked by a jewelry store and had the sudden impulse to shoot up the window, take out the finest rings and bracelets, and run to give them to Lee Ann. Then we could flee to Nevada together.
the gun doesn't help. It becomes a

The time was coming for me to leave Frisco or I'd go crazy. It's not the gun that makes Sal threaten strangers or want to steal, but
catalyst for something else that ought to concern us. When Sal feels lonely the gun becomes the
organ that articulates his pain. It might make him safer, but it does so by increasing [increases] the
distance between Sal and his neighbors. His trust contracts as his pain dilates, and the gun
facilitates the expression of his alienation. My eyes keep pausing on the line "I had to show it to someone." Pointing it at strangers in the men's bathroom is
at once a threat of violence and a plea to be known, a disclosure of a secret. Hard times can make us wary, and when fear governs our decisions, our concern for safety can distract us from the
work of fostering wholeness in ourselves and in our communities. Fearing for our safety, we focus on our individual rights, without thinking about the best way to exercise those rights, like the
men who bring assault weapons, to political rallies, or like the guy who brought his AR15 into a Kroger in Charlottesville, Va., recently, simply because he could.
This influence is empirically confirmed --- denial of purchase decreases risk of

recidivism.
(Garen J. Wintemute 13 [renowned expert on the public health crisis of gun violence and a pioneer in the field of injury epidemiology and
Gun Policy and Research Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 2013//FT)
Most importantly, denial

appears to reduce risk for new criminal activity among those persons who are
denied. The strongest evidence for this comes from a quasi-experimental evaluation of Californias
decision to extend its prohibitions to persons convicted of violent misdemeanors (Wintemute et al. 2001). The
prohibition lasts for 10 years following their convictions. Study subjects were aged 21 to 34; all had prior convictions for violent misdemeanors.
The intervention group comprised 927 persons who sought to purchase handguns in 1991 and were denied under the terms of the new policy. The
control group included 727 persons who sought to purchase handguns in 1989 or 1990, just before the policy changed, and whose purchases were
approved. Subjects were followed for up to three years. Overall, 33.0% of subjects were arrested during follow-up: 21.8% for a firearm- related
or violent offense and 22.1% for offenses of other types (Table 6.4). Per-
sons whose purchases were approved were
more likely than those who were denied to be arrested for a firearm-related or violent offense (relative
hazard 1.2) but not for other offenses (relative hazard 0.9). In both groups, as always, risk of arrest was strongly related to age and the number of
prior misdemeanor convictions (Table 6.4). Denial
was associated with a significant decrease in risk of arrest,
both overall and for subjects stratified by age or number of prior convictions. These findings persisted in
multivariate analysis (Table 6.5). Purchasers were more likely than denied persons to be arrested for new firearm-related or violent crimes
(relative hazard 1.3), but not for other crimes (relative hazard 1.0). Simi- lar results were seen in subgroups stratified by age, number of prior
convictions for any crime, and number of prior convictions for a firearm-related or violent crime. The only exception was for subjects with three
or more prior convictions for firearm-related or violent crimes. In this group with an established pattern of such activity, denial of handgun
purchase may have no effect.
Young Adults
Prohibit 18-20 year olds from having handgunsitll save lives!!!!
Daniel W. Webster et al. 12 and Jon S. Vernick and Katherine Vittes and Emma McGinty and Stephen Teret and Shannon Frattaroli [all
MPH except McGinty. Vernick and Teret have JDs, Vittes and Frattaroli have PhDs. Tl;dr these people are all very qualified]The Case for Gun
Policy Reforms in America, John Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, October 2012, BE
Restrictions on youths ability to purchase and possess firearms should be broadened. Although
federal law and most state law allows youth 18 to 20 years of age to legally possess a handgun,
youth of these ages have some of the highest rates of homicide offending. Age-specific homicide
offending rates rise sharply in the late teens and peak at age 20.38 (See figure below.) In an examination of the
background and legal status of gun offenders incarcerated in the 13 states with the weakest standards for legal firearm ownership, the largest
segment of offenders who would have been prohibited in other states with stricter standards were
those who were between 18 and 20 years of age.33 Heightened risk-taking, and concerns for protecting youth and the public from
alcohol abuse resulted in laws in all 50 states, establishing 21 as the minimum legal age for alcoholic beverage consumption. These laws led to
significant reductions in deaths from motor vehicle crashes involving drivers ages 18-20.39 Yet, *thirty-eight states allow 18- to
20-year-olds to legally possess as many handguns as they desire.
Domestic Violence
Plan reduces violence.
Stachelberg, Winnie, Arkadi Gerney, Chelsea Parsons, and Megan Knauss. "Preventing Domestic Abusers and Stalkers from Accessing Guns." Center for American
Progress. 2 N.p., 9 May 2013. Web. 2
Disarming individuals subject to a domestic-violence restraining order is an effective means of
protecting victims from future gun violence. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that state laws disqualifying
individuals under restraining orders from gun possession were associated with a 19 percent
reduction in the risk of intimate-partner homicides and a 25 percent reduction in the risk of
intimate-partner homicides with a gun. Currently, 17 states either prohibit people subject to a temporary domestic-violence restraining order
from possessing guns or give judges discretion to order the surrender of guns from such individuals. Those subject to a temporary restraining order issued by a civil
or criminal court in domestic-violence proceedings are routinely deprived of numerous freedoms before there is an opportunity for a full hearing. Courts often issue
temporary restraining orders on an ex parte basis that direct respondents to stay away from their own homes, to have no contact with their children, and to stay away
Such orders, while
from numerous other locations, including schools, workplaces, and other places where the victim is likely to be present.
temporarily infringing on the freedom of a respondent before the individual has had an
opportunity for a full hearing on the accusations, are necessary to protect victims of domestic
violence while the court proceedings are pending. Courts already have processes in place to ensure that respondents are quickly
afforded a full and fair hearing on the accusations against them. Congress should act to ensure that a respondent in a domestic-violence proceeding is prohibited from
gun ownership upon being served with a temporary restraining order. This
will help prevent victims from the escalating violence
that too often accompanies the service of these orders such as in the tragic murder of Teri Lee.
The plan is key to reducing intimate partner violence homicide.

Vittes et al. 13 [Katherine A. Vittes, PhD, MPH, is a research associate at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. Daniel
W. Webster, ScD, MPH, is a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health. Jon S. Vernick, JD, MPH, is an associate professor and associate chair in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health], REDUCING GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis,
Center for Gun Policy and Research Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 2013//FT
Few rigorous scientific studies directly examine whether laws prohibiting individuals in specific high-risk groups from purchasing or possessing
firearms reduce criminal offending by prohibited individuals (Hahn et al. 2005; Welford, Pepper, and Petrie 2004). However, studies that
examine the effects of prohibiting access to firearms by perpetrators of domestic violence suggest that these laws can effectively reduce violence.
For example, Wintemute and colleagues (2001) examined a California law that expanded firearm prohibitions to include persons convicted of
violent misdemeanors. The study found that misdemeanants
who were denied purchase of a handgun due to a
change in the law were less likely than handgun purchasers to commit subsequent violent and gun-
related crime. Studies also have found that state laws prohibiting firearm possession by those
subject to certain types of domestic violence restraining orders are associated with lower rates of
intimate partner homicide (Vigdor and Mercy 2003, 2006; Zeoli and Webster 2010).
Pretty good card saying it solves

Zeoli and Frattaroli 13 [April M. Zeoli, PhD, MPH, is an assistant professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State
University. Shannon Frattaroli, PhD, MPH, is an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health], REDUCING
GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis, Center for Gun Policy and Research Johns Hopkins Bloomberg
School of Public Health, 2013, BE
Three studies have examined how state laws limiting access to guns for DVRO respondents and domestic violence misdemeanants affect IPH
(Vig- dor and Mercy 2003, 2006; Zeoli and Webster 2010). Vigdor and Mercy examined the effects of state DVRO and domestic violence
misdemeanant gun restrictions on state-level IPH from 1982 to 1998 (2003), and again from 1982 to 2002 (2006). In both studies, DVRO
laws were significantly associated with reductions in IPH risk, both for IPHs committed with guns
and total IPHs. Further investigation uncovered that these reductions rested on the capacity of
states to support background checks on would-be gun purchasers (Vigdor and Mercy 2003, 2006). This finding
highlights the importance of ensuring that systems for implementing these laws are in place and
supported: the prohibition against purchasing a gun can be effective only if background checks yield current, comprehensive, and accurate
disqualifying information. There was also a measurable difference in the effect of laws prohibiting gun purchases compared to laws prohibiting
possession only (Vigdor and Mercy 2006). In states prohibiting purchase, total and gun IPH had an associated reduction of 10% to 12%; there
was no measurable impact of possession- only laws. Purchase may be the more effective prohibited action because the restriction on possession
relies on respondents to voluntarily surrender their guns or law enforcement to collect guns from newly prohibited respondents (Vigdor and
Mercy 2006). A later analysis of state domestic violence gun laws and IPH in 46 U.S. cities from 1979 to 2003 provides further evidence of the
state DVRO laws impact (Zeoli and Webster 2010). The 46 cities were in 27 states, 15 of which have DVRO gun prohibitions and 9 of which
have domestic violence misdemeanant gun prohibitions. Cities
in states with DVRO gun restrictions had 19% fewer
IPHs and 25% fewer IPHs committed with guns compared to cities without those state laws (Zeoli and
Webster 2010). Taken together, these three studies provide compelling evidence that DVRO gun restrictions
reduce IPH. Importantly, the results of all three studies show that those reductions are not limited to
IPHs committed with guns, suggesting that there is no discernible substitution effect. Would-be
killers do not replace guns with other weapons to affect the same number of killings. Or, put another way,
the evidence suggests that state DVRO gun prohibitions save lives.
Abuse of State Power
Gun rights leads to individuality rather than collectivity which makes us atomized
and paves the way for tyranny.
Make Us Free?: Democracy and the Armed Society, Yale University Press, 19 May 2015, CC
extreme individualism
Rousseau and Tocqueville maintain that democracies, like all states, devolve through political concentration. Viewing the young American democracy, Tocqueville deduces that
greases the wheels of this process. Materialism sharpens our individualism and makes us devoted to personal gain, as opposed to personal glory, which is more amenable to civic
participation. Egalitarianism ironically urges us to dissociate from others, Tocqueville suggests; if my neighbors and compatriots are neither above me nor below me, what need do I have for them? In the ancien rgime, people in
different stations relied on one another, and the pieces of society fit together into a seamless whole. Not so in the new world: here, I may be self-determining and self-sufficient. Tocqueville offers a vision of aristocracy that is too rosy.
He suggests that the masses should rely on the expertise of the nobility, who are bred and trained for leadership. But the American instinct to reject expertise and authority in favor of self-reliance is, for Tocqueville, at least equally
disastrous. It is wonderful so long as it inspires the political attention and interest he witnessed in New England town meetings, but civic involvement is ultimately bound to lose out to capitalistic endeavors and the seductive joys of
consumerism. Civic involvement has become a casualty in our own era, when we suffer from time poverty, as sociologist Juliet Schor put it: Americans put in long work days, combined with increasingly long commutes, and have
little time or energy to interact with their peers, work for their communities, or even think much about politics. 88 This state of affairs is fueled by personal ambition, but also by plain greed. As Tocqueville presciently saw, Americans
This fragmentation of society into

have little interest, and are left with little energy, to be political creatures, and to devote time to thoughtful and concerted political action and interaction.
atomistic individuals, each pursuing his or her own endeavor in isolation or in contention with others, renders us
vulnerable and ripe for oppression: What resistance can be offered to tyranny in a country where
each individual is weak and where citizens are not united by any common interest? 89 There is
perhaps no individualism more extreme than that put forth by the contemporary gun rights movement. The NRA
argues against the collective reading of the Second Amendment and insists instead upon the individual
citizens right to amass a colossal private arsenal. The organization toils on behalf of individuals
right to shoot intruders in their private abodes without accountability or social judgment. It works
to ensure that individuals can act impulsively in private arguments, according to their personal
whims, passions, and prejudices. It demands that they be permitted ammunition capable of piercing bulletproof vests worn by police. None of these advances a collective right or concern. It
is to further the interests of each individual in being armed to the teeth, with whatever tools, for whatever purpose (provided it is within the law), and to have greater leeway in wielding and employing them. These arms
represent a suspicion of the collective, and of the government that would represent the collective good. I argued in the previous chapter how these weapons are a mark of suspicion, and
deepen the suspicion of the armed. A gun fundamentally severs its bearer from the community of his peers; it causes
others to treat [them] him with trepidation and fear if they approach him at all. As open carry proponents proudly
assert, their weapons are intended to serve as a warning. Saul Cornell chides contemporary gun rights ideology
for promoting gun ownership primarily as a means for repulsing government or other citizens, not
a means for creating a common civic culture. 90 This, he argues, is at odds with the aims and intentions of our Founders. He believes they did envision an individual right
to bear arms, but it was never meant to be a right in isolation. It was to be linked to a civic function and to collective obligation. Cornell writes, The original version of a well-regulated militia was premised on the notion that rights
and obligations were inseparable. Arms bearing was a public activity, a way of nurturing and demonstrating ones capacity for virtue. The militia was viewed by the Founders as a vital political and social institution, part of a seamless
web that knit the locality, the state, and the national government together into a cohesive political community. 91 Cornells argument aptly depicts how the current gun rights movement undermines civic life. Gun rights, as they are
currently conceived and championed by the NRA, are the ultimate go-it-alone rights. If our Founders felt that the Second Amendment would help oppose
tyrannical government, it is reasonable to wonder how such opposition was ever to be mobilized. It could hardly happen in a nation of
armed, isolated individuals, each in charge of a private arsenal. This purpose requires a trained, organized regulated
force; it implies collective action, purpose, will, and commitment. George Washington grew tired of militias to the extent that they were loose
collections of individuals. He wanted a fighting force with cohesion, identity, and organization because he was a warrior, and he knew what war or the toppling of tyrannical regimes required. The gun rights
movement pits the individual against society. Collectives are suspect, groups weak, their members sheeplike, obedient, pliant, and ultimately subservient. Collectives breed
collective behavior, which is reprehensible to the movements bold, assertive, fearless, and morally certain adherents. People mired in collective sensibilities wait for the police to bail them out of threatening situations. Free, confident,
strong individuals go it alone. Collectives are corruptible, their members easy to manipulate and herd. Only the independent individual is pure and inviolate. Political freedom thus stems from the uncorrupted and incorruptible
sovereign individual. To gun rights advocates, that is the center and foundation of liberty. This much is clear from the political vision put forth by Napolitano and LaPierre: the principal political battlefield, anticipated by the Founding
Fathers who knew tyranny firsthand, is between the individual fighting to retain his sovereignty, and the collective that would strip it away. This stripping-away takes place through, among other things, government efforts to regulate
guns, abetted by those who would cede their freedom for the short-term prospect of personal safety. In the process, such people unwittingly empower tyranny. Dan Baum writes Guns are the perfect stand-in for one of the fundamental,
irresolvable, and recurring questions we face: to what extent should Americans live as a collective, or as a nation of rugged individuals? We have the same fight over health care, welfare, environmental regulations, and a hundred
other issues. The firearm, though, is the ultimate emblem of individual sovereignty, so if youre inclined in that direction, protecting gun rights is essential. And if youre by nature a collectivist, the firearm is the abhorrent idol on the
enemys altar. 92 Baum articulates the dichotomy aptly, at least as it is viewed by the gun rights movement. Tyranny has also been invoked in recent debates over health care and environmental regulation. It follows from, and is
symptomatic of, collectivism and anything that points in that direction. The gun rights movement offers us radical individualism the sovereign individual as the requisite remedy. But its advocates do not perceive, or refuse to
Contrary to what they assert, their sovereign individuals, even armed to the
admit, how politically debilitating their agenda is.
teeth, are no match for the brute power of tyrants. Instead, the NRA and company unwittingly assist tyrants with their (as Cornell puts it) radically anti-civic
vision. 93 The gun rights movement undermines the collective or popular organization that alone might
prove effective in countering a government bent on oppression.

Gun rights are a false check on government powerthey make individuals feel that
they, independently, are able to check government power, while instead a collective
is needed.
Guns are one such source of consolation. A

pretense to vigilance is at the heart of gun rights rhetoric: the right
to be armed is a loaded gun held to the head of government. That ought to keep our rulers in check and make them
wary of expanding power. Gun rights advocates fancy themselves open-eyed realists about the power plays
of government the democratic masses are soft and deluded for the most part, but gun owners are disillusioned and hardened. Like Dan
Baums gun shop owner, they know that there is evil in the world, especially in government, while those poor liberals mindlessly consign
government ever more power and control through regulation. For Wayne LaPierre and company, the gun signals
vigilance and serves as a political warning. Voting becomes a secondary political act in fact, if the
system is corrupt, as gun rights advocates maintain, voting is irrelevant. Being armed is a superior
statement of freedom. Voting may put in power the same cronies or new ones, but guns serve a warning to cronyism itself. Guns
are the ultimate act of political defiance, in this view, a real thorn in the side of those who rule. This is
precisely why a free people must have this right. Of course, as I have argued, privately owned guns pose no such threat.
Individually armed citizens are more of a menace to one another than to those who hold the reins of
our government. But there is something satisfying in the gun rights position. It claims to constitute a powerful political stance with a
serious philosophical pedigree. The latter claim is credible and accurate the gun rights position is born of a tradition of suspecting government
and fending off the concentration of power. But the
current movement does nothing to advance the philosophical
instincts and interests at its root. Instead it gravely undermines them. Gun rights provide a
seductive aura of self-determination but no actual political power to advance anything but gun ownership. To the
contrary, the gun rights movement diverts many from the real avenues and machinations of political
power. Gun rights are an effective smokescreen, Machiavelli might say, that allows the prince to train and marginalize his charges, and get on
with growing his personal estate and command.
Additionally, possession of guns directly trades off with deliberation because it

refuses to cede power to the collectiveit assumes that individuals should be
arbiters of law.
The notion that guns are conducive to equality is delusional, or at least deeply misguided. It
is reminiscent of the terrible equality
Hobbes invokes in the state of nature, which he counts a war of each on each. For Hobbes, in nature, we are
free to pursue any and all desires men are also equal in power. We are all equal in the ability to get what we want, more or
less, and in our ability to dispose of those who stand in our way. This equality is what makes nature
so terrifying, according to Hobbes: everyone is to be feared, everyone suspected. If people were unequal with
respect to power, this might allow for the emergence of basic societies, and order the powerless would line up behind the strong. It is the standoff created by a
violent equality that makes life nasty, brutish, and short. 97 Thus we must hasten to depart nature, Hobbes maintains, and enter civil society, where we no longer
have to advance our interests and assert our equal rights at the point of a sword, and may achieve a modicum of peace, stability, and security. In civil society,
we exchange armed equality for unarmed equality. In civil society, as our Founding Fathers saw it, equality among our peers and
with our government is to be achieved and enforced by law. This is what John Adams meant when he said that ours is a government of laws, not men. No
individual will should rule and get its way; we must be ruled by indifferent, impersonal law. Men are not
required to ensure their safety and secure their rights by brute force but by the protection of the laws. This is the great relief that civil society offers. Yet it is
difficult to maintain a state of affairs where rights and equality are protected by law, and gun
rights advocates are correct to suspect that they are perennially threatened. Individual interests
chip away at our rights, subvert the law according to their design, and must be fended off and kept in place. But the
proper response is to do this effectively, and not to embrace viscerally appealing remedies that,
while offering the illusion of defending our rights, in fact erode them further.
Chilling Effect
The proliferation of gun ownership in society chills democratic deliberation by
replacing freedom with fear and restricting individual self-expression against
established norms.
FIRMIN DEBRABANDER 12 [associate professor of philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore and the author of
Spinoza and the Stoics], The Freedom of an Armed Society, NY Times, 16 Dec 2012, BE
Individual gun ownership and gun violence has long been a distinctive feature of American
society, setting us apart from the other industrialized democracies of the world. Recent legislative developments, however, are progressively
bringing guns out of the private domain, with the ultimate aim of enshrining them in public life. Indeed, the N.R.A. strives for a day when the
open carry of powerful weapons might be normal, a fixture even, of any visit to the coffee shop or grocery store or classroom. As N.R.A.
president Wayne LaPierre expressed in a recent statement on the organizations Web site, more guns equal more safety, by their account. A
favorite gun rights saying is an armed society is a polite society. If we allow ever more people to be armed, at any time, in any place, this will
provide a powerful deterrent to potential criminals. Or if more citizens were armed like principals and teachers in the classroom, for example
they could halt senseless shootings ahead of time, or at least early on, and save society a lot of heartache and bloodshed. As
ever more
people are armed in public, however even brandishing weapons on the street this is no longer
recognizable as a civil society. Freedom is vanished at that point. And yet, gun rights advocates famously maintain
that individual gun ownership, even of high caliber weapons, is the defining mark of our freedom as such, and the ultimate guarantee of our
enduring liberty. Deeper reflection on their argument exposes basic fallacies. In her book The Human Condition, the philosopher Hannah
Arendt states that violence is mute. According to Arendt, speech dominates and distinguishes the polis, the highest form of human association,
and the threat of it is a pre-
which is devoted to the freedom and equality of its component members. Violence
political manner of communication and control, characteristic of undemocratic organizations and
hierarchical relationships. For the ancient Athenians who practiced an incipient, albeit limited
form of democracy (one that we surely aim to surpass), violence was characteristic of the master-slave
relationship, not that of free citizens. This becomes clear if only you pry a little more deeply into the N.R.A.s logic behind an
armed society. An armed society is polite, by their thinking, precisely because guns would compel
everyone to tamp down eccentric behavior, and refrain from actions that might seem threatening. The suggestion is
that guns liberally interspersed throughout society would cause us all to walk gingerly not make
any sudden, unexpected moves and watch what we say, how we act, whom we might offend. As our
Constitution provides, however, liberty entails precisely the freedom to be reckless, within limits, also the freedom to insult and offend as the case
may be. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld our right to experiment in offensive language and ideas, and in some cases, offensive action
and speech. Such experimentation is inherent to our freedom as such. But guns by their nature do not mix with this experiment they dont
mix with taking offense. They are combustible ingredients in assembly and speech. I often think of the armed protestor
who showed up to one of the famously raucous town hall hearings on Obamacare in the summer of 2009. The media was very worked up over
this man, who bore a sign that invoked a famous quote of Thomas Jefferson, accusing the president of tyranny. But no one engaged him at the
protest; no one dared approach him even, for discussion or debate though this was a town hall meeting, intended for just such purposes.
Such is the effect of guns on speech and assembly. Like it or not, they transform the bearer, and
end the conversation in some fundamental way. They announce that the conversation is not
completely unbounded, unfettered and free; there is or can be a limit to negotiation and debate
definitively. The very power and possibility of free speech and assembly rests on their non-violence. The power of the Occupy
Wall Street movement, as well as the Arab Spring protests, stemmed precisely from their non-
violent nature. This power was made evident by the ferocity of government response to the Occupy movement. Occupy protestors across
the country were increasingly confronted by police in military style garb and affect. Imagine what this would have looked like
had the protestors been armed: in the face of the New York Police Department assault on Zuccotti Park, there might have been
armed insurrection in the streets. The non-violent nature of protest in this country ensures that it can occur.
Empirics are also on our sideexamples from protests show that discussion is
chilled by the fear of guns.
In recent years, guns
have made prominent appearances at political rallies, most notably at protests
against the bill that would become the Affordable Care Act in the summer of 2009. Few policy developments in
this country have been as successful as healthcare reform in stoking strong emotions, mostly on the right so much so that some individuals felt they needed an
additional element to express their extreme displeasure. The
media were dumbfounded at the sight of armed protesters;
many commentators did not know what to make of them, or what they signified, beyond suggesting
a threat to President Obamas life if he was in the vicinity. In two of those incidents, the president was indeed nearby, and
though police officers warily eyed the armed protesters, they could not take away the weapons, arrest the protesters, or send them away, thanks to local open carry
laws. These incidents, however, show how guns stand opposed to the notion of protest in a democracy. In
August 2009, the president traveled to Phoenix to deliver a speech promoting healthcare reform. The large crowd gathered outside the venue included both supporters
and critics of his plan. Some of the critics were armed. One man who drew much media attention was neatly dressed, with an AR-15 (a semiautomatic weapon) slung
over his shoulder and a holstered handgun on his hip. When approached by reporters who wanted to know why he felt the need to bring and display his weapons
at this gathering, the man revealed little. He identified himself only as Chris, and explained his actions by saying: Because I can do it. In Arizona, I still have some
freedoms left. 75 The media reported that the man started arguing with many opposing protesters. Police warily shadowed him throughout. A week earlier,
an armed individual had shown up for the presidents appearance in New Hampshire. He wore a
holstered handgun on his thigh and carried a sign declaring It is time to water the tree of liberty.
This invoked Jeffersons line: The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. 76 His sign ostensibly
called for armed revolt or assassination, but the police did not remove him from the scene, even
though the president was close by; they said they were legally barred from doing so. The man, who identified
himself in this instance his name was William Kostric was not overtly angry or unruly, though his sign surely suggested otherwise. He also stood alone. When
asked what was intended by his solo armed protest, Kostric stated: I wanted people to remember the rights that we have and how quickly were losing them in this
Law enforcement officials
country. It doesnt take a genius to see were traveling down a road at breakneck speed thats towards tyranny. 77
were not amused by either protest. They complained that these were needlessly provocative
gestures that threatened to divert their attention and energies away from protecting the president.
One police officer said of an armed protester, Just by his presence and people seeing the rifle, and people knowing the president was in town, it sparked a lot of
emotions. 78 A political scientist, reflecting on the armed protesters in Phoenix, said, When
you start to bring guns to political
rallies, it does layer on another level of concern and significance. It actually becomes quite scary for
many people. It creates a chilling effect in the ability of our society to carry on honest
communication . 79 By raising the issue of speech, this comment cuts to the heart of the matter. Guns silence they frustrate free
speech , even while the NRA boasts that guns protect and bolster it. Guns by their very presence issue a threat, and to that
extent, they cut off communication, or indicate that its end is near. Consider the man in New Hampshire: his sign and
weapon did not indicate that he had shown up at the presidents speech with an open mind. To the contrary, they declared that his mind was made up definitively
and that only revolt was in order. He had already determined that the time for speech was past. It is provocative enough to carry a poster saying It is time to water the
tree of liberty. It is quite another and more urgent matter to display these words while also displaying a gun. Kostric did not engage in dialogue protesters did not
approach him to enter into debate and it is easy to see why. Who would want to? His weapon was message enough. Who would think Kostric would be open to
anything other than an affirmation of his existing beliefs? The protester in Phoenix engaged opponents, but his weapon sent a similar message. It probably discouraged
opponents from getting too worked up or responding too angrily. Ironically, the displays of guns at these protests raised most
peoples degree of alarm at the same time that they likely subdued many who might have wished to
engage the armed protesters. Few people would be willing to say what they really think to armed individuals in those situations. Theyre
intimidating people like its a western saloon, said one Secret Service agent about the armed protesters. 80 Guns defeated the purpose of the
public gatherings in both cases: they subdued some of the louder voices in favor of healthcare
reform and indicated the level and extremes of the opposition. The guns also underscored the divide between the
camps, making the possibility of dialogue more remote. Kostric insisted that his carrying a gun was symbolic, his intent peaceful, and that he should not be seen as a
threat at least, not on that day, at that protest. 81 Armed protesters have issued similar statements at other events in recent years, including Tea Party rallies. At the
Second Amendment rally across the Potomac River from Washington in Virginia in 2010, where many people carried guns, the preponderant message was that the
Obama administration had overstepped its constitutional bounds and needed to be stopped even by armed resistance. Were serious. Were going to do whatever it
takes, one man declared. 82 Apparently realizing the tenor of his statement, he quickly added that he didnt mean anyone would get blown up or shot. 83 Another
protester offered the ominous prediction that in these next two years, its not gonna be like any other two years youve ever seen. And I think there will be blood.
They can have mine. 84 Kostric has issued chilling threats, too, such as in an online defense of drug dealers killing cops who enter their homes: If people cant wake
up and see why its immoral to trespass and destroy someones property, kidnap and lock them in a cage for growing a plant in their backyard, then perhaps a body
count is whats required for change. 85 This sums up what is worrisome about armed
protesters: they seem all too comfortable with
the prospect of body counts as a means of bringing about change. At a 2010 Tea Party rally in New Mexico, an armed
protester carried a sign saying Bring it on, Obama. 86 Another said he carried his gun to express his extreme displeasure with what he perceived as a dawning
Communist takeover of the U.S. government. Im not trying to start a war, he explained. I just want to make a point. 87 Its hard to imagine, in this context, what
that point might be, short of war. A gun at a protest is a physical threat, not a verbal or procedural one; the man and his
companions wished to issue a threat to the president with their guns. These protesters may be more threatening still if we consider that their guns are loaded. When the
group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America staged a rally in Indianapolis in 2013, they were met by a counterprotest that included demonstrators armed
with AR-15s. One of the counterprotesters, asked if his gun was loaded, said that of course it was: Any weapon that is not loaded is just a rock or a club. 88 Our
democracy has always preserved a place for radical voices. To the consternation of many, we even allow avowed racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to stage
public marches. But guns
add a new and radical element to the mix, an element that is at odds with the idea
of political discussion and risks destroying our culture of assembly. At an emotionally charged rally, how are you
supposed to talk to someone with a gun? How are you to feel comfortable and free to march with an armed protester looking on his gun a not-so-subtle threat to
your political position, perhaps, and an expression of extreme anger? Gun rights groups might retort, let everyone be armed. According to their reasoning, guns protect
and affirm speech; if you are afraid to speak out in public, a gun will restore your courage. I have tried to imagine what would have happened if people on all sides of
the issue had been armed at the Obamacare rallies. How might Kostric have reacted if armed Obamacare apologists stood defiantly in front of him? Would there be
any exchange of words or any need for it? The scene sounds more like a standoff than political assembly who would dare speak out in that setting, and what
would you say? What need is there to say anything? And what if heated arguments did occur? If shots were fired, what would happen next?
Handguns keylong guns cant be concealed.

Dixon 93, Nicholas. "Why We Should Ban Handguns in the United States." . Louis U. Pub. L. Rev. 12 (1993): 243. CC
Another reason to doubt that long guns would be used in great numbers to replace handguns in robberies, assaults, and homicides is
that long guns are obviously much more difficult to conceal. A potential mugger roaming the streets
wielding a long gun will cause everyone in sight to flee, and is likely to be quickly arrested when
alarmed people call the police. Similarly, a bank robber carrying a long gun will be immediately detected by security guards, alarm systems will be triggered, and
the chances of a successful robbery greatly diminished. Handguns are obviously much more convenient for the commission of such crimes. Kates and
Benenson point out that most homicides occur in the home, where concealability is "irrelevant."95 However, concealability would seem to be an important factor even
in the home. Since the victim may well be unaware that the killer is carrying a concealed weapon, the "surprise factor" which is peculiar to handguns can still apply even in the home.
In contrast, people can hardly be unaware that the person they are with is carrying a shotgun or rifle.
Moreover, in any argument or domestic quarrel, regardless of whether the potential victim knows
that the assaulter is carrying a handgun, the ease of pulling out the gun and shooting makes such
arguments more likely to spill over into murder. In contrast, by the time the assaulter has gone into
another room to retrieve their long gun and loaded it, the potential victim has crucial seconds in
which to escape. Another reason that the concealability of handguns is not a good reason for a handgun-only ban is proposed by Hardy and Kates in their discussion of the impact
of handgun control on robberies. They point out that "[t]he difference between a long gun and a handgun is ten minutes and a hacksaw."' Even robberies, then, would not be diminished by a
handgun ban. However, this contention runs directly counter to the evidence collected by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms' Project Identification. Seventy-one percent, or 7,538, of
the handguns submitted for tracing, had a barrel length of 3 inches or less. Sixty-one percent, or 6,476, had a caliber of .32 or less. Since both of these factors relate to the size of the weapon,
figures indicate that concealability is an overriding factor in selecting a handgun for use in
these
crime. 7 Sawed-off shotguns will be much longer and much bulkier than any of these short and small-caliber handguns, especially "Saturday Night Specials," which combine a caliber of
.32 or less with a barrel length of three inches or less, comprised 44% of all the weapons successfully traced, and fit into the palm of an average sized hand. We may conclude, then, that because
of the difficulty of concealment, neither long guns nor sawed-off versions of the same are likely to be used in great numbers to replace handguns in the commission of crimes. The
difficulty of concealment factor will outweigh the greater lethalness of long gun shots.
Consequently, a ban on handguns will indeed result in a decrease in firearms-related homicide and
other violent crimes. Since firearms are the most lethal weapons, and they were used in 64.1% of
homicides in the United States in 1990,98 such a ban is, therefore, likely to result in a reduction in
the overall murder rate.'
Specifically in school environments, the breeding ground for a democratic society,

the mere presence of guns chills discourse on controversial issues.
Freire and Dewey remind us that democracy takes root in our schools. As we render them forbidding places, we are likely to see
the results in the kind of citizens and human beings we produce. We must not take this prospect lightly. What is especially disturbing about
this development is that it is not necessary our schools dont need to be fortresslike. We are choosing to take this route rather than regulate gun
ownership, limit the number of weapons out there, and make it harder for people to acquire them. We have chosen instead to turn our schools into
bunkers, at great expense while education funding dwindles in order to accommodate an alleged absolute right to own guns. It is also a key
feature of democracy, a guiding principle of our Founding Fathers, that rights that unduly infringe upon the lives and interests of some, or many,
must be curtailed. People
may engage in the pursuit of happiness however they like, provided that
whatever they deem necessary to that pursuit does not inflict harm or intrude forcefully on the lives
of others. Guns do that. Gun rights, as the NRA currently champions them, are greatly intrusive.
The proliferation of guns in our society leads to much collateral damage innocent bystanders are literally
killed. Further, as is evident in their schools, their proliferation alters the way all of us must live. It is necessary to
consider, as well, the impact of guns on college campuses. While it is true that guns on campus
would be concealed, their legalized presence, perhaps in great numbers, would change things, and
not for the better. Their presence certainly wont help advance the goals of the college classroom and may well hinder them. The mission
of the liberal arts college is to foster creativity and intellectual courage among students; it is to make them open, curious, outgoing citizens.
Accordingly, the
college classroom is a refuge of sorts alternatively, a laboratory where
controversial, sometimes incendiary ideas are aired. Ideally, there are no banned books in the college classroom. If
someone endorses a reprehensible idea, he or she must be defeated in argument and persuasion. College classrooms are supposed to be lively,
sometimes raucous, though I realize that is less often the case than it should be. Nevertheless, colleges remain specially zoned places for
intellectual experimentation, and moral and political questioning. Gunsare inimical to this project and spirit. Sometimes
emotions run high in the college classroom, when ideas are tested and opinions championed or
disputed. Sometimes offense is taken, and given. Is it outrageous to consider that some individuals
might reach for a gun? One college in Texas recently witnessed a gunfight between arguing
students. 70 Perhaps it is not such an outrageous concern after all. Guns in the classroom might encourage professors
to keep the conversation tepid, or incite students to watch what they say, how they say it, and to whom. To that extent, guns
reveal a troubling ability to chasten speech.
Dialogue is key to combat oppressionespecially in educational spaces.

The famed education theorist Paolo Freire called mistrust a major tool of oppression. Freire was interested in educating the children of oppressed
populations with a view to politically empowering them, teaching them to act and behave as invested, willful citizens such as democracy requires.
In his most important work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire deplores what he calls the banking concept of education, whereby students are
deemed fit only to fill up with useful information, digested via rote learning, so that they might become cogs in the machine of society, or in some
cases, members of an existing oppressive system. 60 Freire
wished that schools might produce individuals who
could think critically for themselves, demand their rights, and freely choose their own paths. To
that end, he favors a dialogical theory of education, which he describes as follows: problem-posing education, which
breaks with the vertical patterns characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function as the practice of freedom only if the teacher-of-
the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teacher. 61 Dialogue
carried out in this manner, problem-posing engaged in collectively by students and teachers,
produces a community of questioners in the classroom. It introduces a horizontal relationship a
fundamental equality that will later be politically significant for emergent citizens. Most colleges in twenty-
first-century America take Freires approach its how they already conduct learning in the classroom: faculty are urged to create a de-centered
classroom where students are not intimidated by professors lecturing from the podium, but rather, engaged in discussion and direct
questioning by professors who are seated at the same table as students, and who encourage students to speak their minds and experiment with
their thoughts. Obviously, Freires account does not map neatly onto, say, the kindergarten classroom. Children that age need a disciplinary
figure, and democracy should not necessarily reign in kindergarten. But, Freire would say, his basic theory bears important intuitions even there:
we must still strive to make young students responsive and critical learners, and teach them as far
possible horizontally and collaboratively. They are not simply to be lectured to.
Buyback
Buyback cuts gun deaths empirically consistent results.
Leigh and Neill 10 Do Gun Buybacks Save Lives? Evidence from Panel Data Andrew Leigh, Australian National University and Christine Neill, Wilfrid Laurier
University June 2010 http://ftp.iza.org/dp4995.pdf
Table 5 shows the results of these regressions. For each of the six key outcome variables, four regressions are shown. All regressions incorporate state and year fixed
effects. The second column adds state-specific time trends, the third adds in the socio-economic variables, and the fourth includes both of these. The results are fairly
consistent across these specifications, and in line with the results in Table 4. Introducing the socio-economic variables has little effect on the magnitude of the
coefficients for firearm suicide or homicide, and typically they are not either individually or jointly statistically significant in the regressions. This may reflect the fact
that demographics change quite slowly over time, combined with our reliance on interpolations, making it difficult to separate them out from the Australia-wide year
fixed effects. We would not want to conclude from this that socio-economic factors do not affect homicide or suicide rates, since our empirical strategy likely soaks up
The estimates show very consistently a marked relative
much of the effects of these factors in either the state or year fixed effects.
decline in firearm suicides in states with higher buyback rates after 1997. The point estimates are slightly smaller than those
in Table 4, and suggest that a buyback of 3500 guns per 100,000 individuals (the size of the 1997 buyback) in one state
would reduce firearm suicide rates by between 1.1 and 2.0 deaths per 100,000 relative to a state
with no reduction in firearms; that is between 45 per cent and 78 per cent compared with the
average firearm suicide rate in 1990-1995 of 2.55 per 100,000. The 95 per cent confidence interval in all specifications suggests a
minimum decline in firearm suicides of 18 per cent compared with the average firearm suicide rate in 1990-1995.

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Cases

1AC Gun Ban

2] Abstract theories of justice that strive towards an ideal ignore systems of

3] Debate should deal with real-world consequencesideal theories ignore the

PROPOSED HANDGUN LEGISLATION Prohibits the importation, exportation, manufacture,

gun control is seldom regarded as

Griffin's findings points out

a strong majority of guns

Empirics prove the DC gun ban decreased suicides by handguns

owning a firearm and being competent at using them

Fear of state intervention privatizes security and is uniquely neoliberal lack of

Atrophying public spheres leads to bio political control through apocalyptic

No shift to long guns

Third calling upon the state to change undermines its legitimacy

Fourth, the aff is a revolutionary reformits a concrete expression of systemic critique

Trotsky in 1937): the

The plan is a bulwark that uses the law against itself

Complete rejection of institutional logic of civil society crushes anti-white

Fewer guns mean fewer suicides. Briggs and Tabarrok 13:

And, people won't just use other means. Matthews 15:

Empirics prove the DC gun ban decreased suicides by handguns

2] Abstract theories of justice that strive towards an ideal ignore systems of

3] Debate should deal with real-world consequencesideal theories ignore the

2] Debate should deal with real-world consequencesideal theories ignore the

3] This is key to breaking down the culture of silence.

marginalization is by no means the fate

They are taught by

The Black Panthers for a time went

The deeper violence has been in the

black community on multiple levels, often unforgivingly. State-sanctioned violence, as practiced by

PROPOSED HANDGUN LEGISLATION Prohibits the importation, exportation, manufacture,

The most elementary duty of a community is

gun control is seldom regarded as

Griffin's findings points out

a strong majority of guns

Most importantly, denial

People with records are way more prone to handgun violence.

CP violates the NC, too youre out of luck.

First, given the scope of our discussion, it

Power and dominance are not really

It seems unlikely that power relations

would have to be remade

[their] plan [is]

Even [if] these critiques

are right, we express them in ways only

we publish our work in expensive academic journals

We never make concrete proposals

for what infrastructures

intoxicated cynics immediately jump in with all the ways

How will you meet these problems?

Marx had proposals. Do you?

If you want to make contribution, this is where you should start.

We need less critique not because critique isnt important

opponent with critique. But do we really do anything with critique? What we

need is carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong.

None of us, however, are proposing alternatives. Instead we

prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that.

Progress. N.p., 9 May 2013. Web.

Is guerilla warfare possible? Perhaps,

300 million guns in

Risk of a violent death in the US increases with the purchase of handguns.

2] Non-unique they already enforce gun lawseven if theyre already unequally

Risk of a violent death in the US increases with the purchase of handguns.

Now it's probably true that in many