Instigator / Pro
0
1337
rating
26
debates
9.62%
won
Topic
#1602

The right to stay alive is more important than the right to own a gun

Status
Finished

The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.

Winner & statistics
Winner
0
2

After 2 votes and with 2 points ahead, the winner is...

Patmos
Parameters
Publication date
Last updated date
Type
Standard
Number of rounds
2
Time for argument
Two days
Max argument characters
10,000
Voting period
One week
Point system
Winner selection
Voting system
Open
Contender / Con
2
1588
rating
23
debates
67.39%
won
Description

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw8zvdWF-9s public safety is more important than a dubious hobby https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw8zvdWF-9s

Round 1
Pro
#1
People do not need a gun lke one might need a tv or a car or a phone a computer or central heating, most household get on fine with no guns in them ever.
Gun are dangerous a gun in the home increases your chances of being hurt not decreases http://money.com/money/4389610/gun-ownership-low/  Abstract
OBJECTIVE:
Determine the relative frequency with which guns in the home are used to injure or kill in self-defense, compared with the number of times these weapons are involved in an unintentional injury, suicide attempt, or criminal assault or homicide.
METHODS:
We reviewed the police, medical examiner, emergency medical service, emergency department, and hospital records of all fatal and nonfatal shootings in three U.S. cities: Memphis, Tennessee; Seattle, Washington; and Galveston, Texas.
RESULTS:
During the study interval (12 months in Memphis, 18 months in Seattle, and Galveston) 626 shootings occurred in or around a residence. This total included 54 unintentional shootings, 118 attempted or completed suicides, and 438 assaults/homicides. Thirteen shootings were legally justifiable or an act of self-defense, including three that involved law enforcement officers acting in the line of duty. For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.
CONCLUSIONS:
Guns kept in homes are more likely to be involved in a fatal or nonfatal accidental shooting, criminal assault, or suicide attempt than to be used to injure or kill in self-defense.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9715182


Con
#2

Gun are dangerous a gun in the home increases your chances of being hurt not decreases http://money.com/money/4389610/gun-ownership-low/  
That's not what this source says. Not even close. all this source says is that gun ownership is going down. Which means nothing in this debate. It says nothing about your odds of being harmed in an attack because of the guns in your house. 

So I'm going to build my case by attacking my opponents. The problem with the study that makes up the entirety of his case is that it's hot garbage. Its methodology? Garbage. Its conclusion? also garbage. The reason for that is that it only examines three cities. Seattle Washington, Galveston Texas, and Memphis Tennessee. All three of those cities are outliers in terms of there crime rate. It's easy to make guns appear as if they're used more often by criminals than by law-abiding citizens if you only sample the most dangerous cities in the country. 

Contrast that with this nationwide study from the CDC which states that guns are used in self-defense upwards of 80 times more often than they're used to inflict harm on a victim. "Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.
A different issue is whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gun-wielding crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies (Kleck, 1988; Kleck and DeLone, 1993; Southwick, 2000; Tark and Kleck, 2004)."

So, the defensive uses of firearms are between 500,000 and 3 million times per annum. But the real number is probably somewhere in between. But even that lowest estimate of 500,000 times per year is still radically larger than the 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms. Also, take note that this statistic can't measure the number of times a firearm was brandished but not actually used in self-defense which likely increases the statistic considerably.


Essentially what my opponent is saying is that those (probably) millions of people who defend themselves every year with guns don't have the right to stay alive. He only has fabricated evidence and a horrifically botched study to support his ideas.


Round 2
Pro
#3
"CONCLUSIONS:
Guns kept in homes are more likely to be involved in a fatal or nonfatal accidental shooting, criminal assault, or suicide attempt than to be used to injure or kill in self-defense."
CONCLUSIONS:
Guns kept in homes are more likely to be involved in a fatal or nonfatal accidental shooting, criminal assault, or suicide attempt than to be used to injure or kill in self-defense."CONCLUSIONS:
Guns kept in homes are more likely to be involved in a fatal or nonfatal accidental shooting, criminal assault, or suicide attempt than to be used to injure or kill in self-defense.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9715182
Many studies have shown that most testimonials about gus being used in defense those claims are fruadulent and have been proven so "
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/   "1-3. Guns are not used millions of times each year in self-defense
We use epidemiological theory to explain why the “false positive” problem for rare events can lead to large overestimates of the incidence of rare diseases or rare phenomena such as self-defense gun use.  We then try to validate the claims of many millions of annual self-defense uses against available evidence.  We find that the claim of many millions of annual self-defense gun uses by American citizens is invalid.
Hemenway, David.  Survey research and self-defense gun use: An explanation of extreme overestimates.  Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.  1997; 87:1430-1445.
Hemenway, David.  The myth of millions of annual self-defense gun uses: A case study of survey overestimates of rare events.  Chance (American Statistical Association).  1997; 10:6-10.
Cook, Philip J; Ludwig, Jens; Hemenway, David.  The gun debate’s new mythical number: How many defensive uses per year?  Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.  1997; 16:463-469." 

Con
#4
1. My opponent has dropped my attacks on the study he posted in his last argument. I must assume that he concedes the point.

2.

guns kept in homes are more likely to be involved in a fatal or nonfatal accidental shooting, criminal assault, or suicide attempt than to be used to injure or kill in self-defense.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9715182
This is that same botched study that my opponent dropped my arguments against. The one that cherrypicks only America's most dangerous cities. I've already shown how the methodology of this study is errant to the point of rendering the study's conclusions invalid.

His argument about the defensive use of guns is outdated. My CDC source quotes sources from at late as 2010 while the majority of my opponent's sources come from the '90s. That's important because the '90s was the peak of America's gun violence epidemic. My opponent has also not shown which studies were fraudulently conducted. He needs to prove that my CDC source is fraudulent and point out WHY it's fraudulent. The CDC is one of the world's premier research institutions and my opponent needs to do more than just assert that they're lying. Also, note that the CDC found that nearly all national surveys agree that guns are used defensively AT LEAST as often as they're used by criminals. I ask again since you didn't answer my question the last time: why are you willing to take away the right to live from these people who protected themselves and their right to live with guns?


Moreover, my opponent needs to prove that implementing gun control laws will actually decrease the amount of violent crime. Consider the war on drugs. The government still hasn't been able to keep drugs off of the streets, our schools, or even federal prisons since the war of drugs was launched nearly 50 years ago. The same thing happened during prohibition leading to the organized crime epidemic of that time period. Why then should we disarm ourselves and trust that the government can keep guns out of the hands of criminals when they've already proven themselves to be incompetent in similar situations?