Debate at my school on guns in speech class

tombinghamthegreat · #1 (**permalink**) 12-07-2007, 11:25 PM

Right after the mall shooting.....
Anyway I won my debate with a 3-1 decision and got an A. There is more where the blanks are but i wrote that in.

Thomas Bingham
Opposition Leader
12/6/07
Debate
Liedtke
Topic: gun control

I would like to acknowledge the audience, the judges, and the government’s(this is my opponent) opinion. I would like start out with the court ruling Warren vs. Washington DC. It involves a situation where intruders broke into a house and attacked the resident. Her roommates called the police several times and were told the police would show up soon. 30 minutes later the screams stopped and the roommates came downstairs, assuming the cops arrived. When they went downstairs, the roommates soon realized that the intruders were still in the house. [PAUSE] The prosecutor in the Warren court was quoted in a local DC paper in 1975 to have said, “For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of their attackers”. The three victims later sued the police for failing to protect them, taking it to the highest court in DC. The court upheld that the “fundamental principle of American law (is) that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.'' This ruling led to several major Supreme Court rulings, all which pointed out that it is not the police department job to protect individuals from harm, nor could it be held responsible for failing to uphold the laws since it is the job of the individual to protect themselves. Today, I am here to persuade you to oppose a ban on owning, transferring, and buying firearms to the public. Today Garen and I will be proposing (wrote this in..) ____________ _______________________________.

My ____ contention is….that most gun owners are actively well trained.

A. The government group claims that civilians should not be allowed to defend themselves because they are not trained in use of firearms. This is not true. Many groups such as the NRA,CMP- that’s Civilian Marksman Program for the uneducated-, Boy Scouts, and thousands of other shooting groups endeavor to train tens of millions of people in the proper and safe handling of their firearms. This training can start as young as eleven and is on going throughout many of their lives. Millions of Americans including me has been trained in marksmanship, gun safety, and defensive shooting. This training, in many ways, is equivalent or, in some cases, even better then current police training. One good example would be Concealed Carry Weapon permits. These require police equivalent training in use of firearms. 40 states currently recognize concealed weapons as a right, not a privilege, mostly due to the fact that it has been shown statistically that, according to the FBI national crime stats, it lowers crime. Florida is a perfect example of this.

1. As Robert A. Heinlein would say "An armed society is a polite society"

2. According to Professor John Lotts “The fact is that the firearm accident rates in the

United States have been declining . .since 1975,42 because of the emphasis that has been placed on gun safety education courses, including the NRA¹s Eddie Eagle program (alone) which has now touched providentially in excess of 9 million youngsters in the U.S.43”

My _____ contention is …Guns are not the second leading cause of death among those of 10-17 years of age.

I would like to see their source of this claim, if there is one. Where car related death is ranked #1 with killing about 3-4000 in this age group were guns only kill about 145 kids per year. Should we ban cars which kill 40,000-50,000 Americans per year, where we lost the same amount of US troops in the 15 years of fighting in Vietnam? According to the Center of Disease and Control, ATF, National Safety Council, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (aaps), and Professor John Lotts, Firearm related deaths are rank very low on the list. In the AAPS stat, that children between 10-17 years of age are
1. “14.5 times more likely to die from automobile injuries, 5 times more likely to die from drowning or fire and burns, and 3 times more likely to die from bicycle accidents than they are to die from gun accidents.”

2. By contrast, according to Los Angeles Daily News, Professor Vincent Schiraldi, 88 people were killed by lightning in 1997 where in the same year, 25 kids were shot on campus.

My ____ contention is……banning the sale of firearms will not reduce violence.

A. There is currently over 80 million gun owners with 300 million firearms. Banning the sale would have little impact on gun ownership. It would end up like prohibition and the losing war on drugs. During the prohibition era, the use of alcohol increased among people and the crime rate exploded. The Mafia ran the streets during this time. Now in the drug war, according to a 2006 CNN report, the US economy loses 100 billion a year (60 billion in economic losses, 40 billion in taxes used to fight drugs). And yet, despite their attempts to achieve otherwise, there is not a school campus in the US that is not somehow plagued with drugs. According to this report, the past 40 years of trying to ban drugs is considered to have no impact on this illegal trade and only succeeded in creating the biggest prison system in the world, turning millions into criminals. Now a total ban on firearms would costs according to critics over 500 billion to ban 300 million guns. This would only cause the crime rate to soar such as it already has in DC, and Chicago. Both cities with their gun bans are rated, according to the FBI, to be the most violent cities in the US with a murder rate nearly as bad as Iraq’s current murder rate per 100,000 people. They have the highest amount of guns used in crime, despite the ban on firearms. The national murder rate by guns is 3.74 per 100,000 people in 1999, while the DC murder rate at its worst year was 81 per 100,000 people, thus earning the nickname by the NRA as murder capital of the US. Another thing to note that the act banning of guns could very possibly lead to an armed resistance of 80 million gun owners. Since the 2nd amendment is an unalienable right that cannot be taken away, meaning the government’s opinion on this matter is irrelevant.
1. In 2001, Cal. State Sen. Tom McClintock said, “The right is absolute … government has no authority to forbid me from owning a firearm … the debate is not about guns. It is about freedom.”

My ____contention is…. Gun ban will not reduce school violence

The opponent is obviously manipulating data, if not outright manufacturing it. I will say again, government, where are you pulling these lies that 3,000 shot on campus from, wikipedia? According to the nation crime stats from the FBI, the number of children fatally shot on school campuses from K-12 is about 331, all in the span of 16 years! According to these and other crime stats, knives are the most common weapon used to kill kids on campus. So should we ban knives? What is important in looking at school violence isn’t looking at the method of violence (in this case, guns, knives, hand to hand combat) but looking at the fact that the child feels a need for this violence. This is the real source of the problem, their mentality, not the common scapegoat of school, by which I mean guns.
My____ contention is….firearms is used 2.5 million times a year in self defense.

According to several government study groups on firearms under the both the Clinton and Bush administration, FBI crime stats, Professor John Lotts, AAPS, Gary Kleck, a Florida State University criminologist and thousands of independent studies, guns are used about 2.5 million times a year in self defense. The government is ill informed on the matter and failed to present any evidence. People who have firearms usually tend to keep their guns readily accessible, loaded, hidden in an easy spot to get to, or placed with a quick loading device such as a speed loader or a clip. For most people, the time that it takes to get a weapon loaded is not an issue. Besides, most of the time, all it takes to scare an intruder or possible assailant is to brandish a weapon. All non lethal devices forces user into risky close range fighting whereas a firearm allows distance and thus some security and immediate take down power. In the instructions of these non lethal devices, they clearly state that it is not to be relayed on as a primary weapon and may not effect everyone. If this was a better method of defense, Washington DC would not be the murder capital of the US.

In conclusion, I have pointed out (summerized here) ________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________

Vote for the opposition.

(2nd part of the debate)

(3-4 minutes)Final conclusion: I would like to acknowledge the audience, the judges, and the government members.( I wroten in hand this part, summerized.)....the government sides with gun ban groups who have been quoted on their sites "a women who allows themselves to be raped is morally supperior". Someone who takes side with these people are clearly radicals......____________________________________ _________________

Judges, I ask you to vote for the opposition and I will leave you with one more quote from Ventura County officer Jean Martinez in 2006 in my house, “we can not protect you, it is not our job. We want to but our hands our tied; it took us over 30 minutes to get here. If the guy tries to break in again, you may have to do more than scare him with a gun, you may have to shoot him because we can’t protect your family. We are sorry but as an adult, it is up to you to defend yourself and your family.”

eDgE oF iNsAnItY · 12-08-2007, 12:35 AM

Bleh... I'm too drunk to read it all. Individuals being able to own guns= good! Bottom line.

JumpInTheFire · 12-08-2007, 03:00 AM

I'm going to bed, its 3 am here, so i will read the rest of this tomorrow, but sounds good so far,

and thanks, i did not know about the SC rulings on police not having to protect citizens and determining it is the job of the citizen (which i already knew to be true, but didnt know the court case)

thx again

**Brother of Yeshua** · 12-08-2007, 08:22 AM

GREAT SPEECH!

I didn't understand what you meant by "we filled in the blanks." Like you typed this and wrote in those specifics later?

Regardless, very well said. I'm glad you won. You deserve to.

Now take it to the real government

**Ginevra** · 12-08-2007, 10:23 AM

So what DO the police do?

**Brother of Yeshua** · 12-08-2007, 12:00 PM

Besides bully civilians?

Good question....

tombinghamthegreat · 12-08-2007, 02:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ginevra

So what DO the police do?

The term "protect and serve" only applies to government. They are there to protect the government and serve the government. The police dept. is really not suppose to exist and the military or "militia" is defined as males 18-40. So it is the people's job to defend the country not the government's job. Also the blanks was to write in when they gave their speech so i could have my speech adjustable to attack their arguement. My partner filled in some of my gaps to fether help my arguements. he used the can't blame the the fork for making rose fat.

Parker vs. DC gun ban case 2006
To summarize, we conclude that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right existed prior to the formation of the new government under the Constitution and was premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government (or a threat from abroad). -judges in the case