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Vote Justification Sheet Topic: Gun Control

Name: Hari Rau-Murthy Assigned Role:Tom Harkin

What does the bill attempt to solve?

The bill addresses the increasing number of massacres that have happened over the last year

and half.

What does the bill propose?

This bill proposes to restrict the access of assault weapons.

Arguments against the Bill:

It would be great if one could restrict guns. The problem is that they are already

embedded firmly in society.

This is somewhat like the effect of class size on learning material better. Even 1:1

ratio(tutor) does not accomplish all the right things due to issues such as learning

through the Prussian model.(cf. The One World School House- Salman Khan[creator of

Khan Academy]) Class size is the only issue that a legislator can wrap his/her mind

around even though it has a marginal effect on education - moreover time spent on this

is time wasted on other issues.

Gun control is the parallel of trying to decrease the student:teacher ratio. Gun

has a marginal effect when compared to proper special education funding and

changing the way our society glorifies guns to make people stronger than they

actually are. Excessive time spent on gun control means less time spent on

other issues.

Arguments for the Bill: More guns in the public engenders more chaos in the long run; even if in a few stray

situations, people defend themselves successfully.

In all the past massacres(defined as when more than 4 people die at one event), people

either fail to shoot from shock, or fire at the wrong target.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/opinion/collins-looking-for-america.html)

Even police officers use guns with discretion; even with their training they

usually injure many more people while trying to catch the person.(cf. Columbine

massacres and Empire State building shooting).

It is not acceptable that people on a range in the NRA buy assault military weapons with

large magazines just because it is a pain to reload when mowing down clay pigeons.

One cannot argue that the founding fathers specifically wanted to make sure Americans

retained their right to carry rifles capable of mowing down dozens of people in a couple

of minutes.(see nytimes article above)

Gun buybacks have worked in the past with similar minded societies. In Australia after

14 years of gun violence and a multiple massacres, the largest with 37 people dead, the

government bought back guns. There has not been a single massacre since(14 years).

Reaction: Bowling for Columbine - Michael Moore

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This movie was originally shown with the intention of bringing more arguments to the

floor with respect to Gun Control. The day after the first part of the movie was shown about the

Columbine Massacre 13 and a half years back with 32 people dead in Colorado, there was a

shooting in Newtown in a place less than an hour drive from Yorktown with 28 people dead.

Therefore it was out of place to watch a movie about something 13 years back when there

was a real thing happening very close to home in a similar remote area with nearly the samemagnitude of destruction as the former.

Overall, despite the provocative nature of the movie and the more-than-bargained-for

presence of Michael Moore in the film, there were great statistics to back up his claims. In

contrast to his other documentaries, he resisted the temptation to cherry pick his data so that he

could publish the best findings. The claim he made in the first part of the movie was well

founded: the only plausible cause for the violence is the fact that guns are more readily

available than in other major developed countries. He does this via contrapositive by showing

that countries that would be very violent when considering other factors such as video game

violence fall heavily behind US in deaths attributable to guns.

People often criticize that Michael Moore is not giving just the facts. The fact of the

matter is that anybody making a documentary is by definition trying to advocate a certain

viewpoint. In fact, when comparing this to other documentaries, Michael Moore is unique in that

he declares that he is a liberal activist. The fact that there isnt a documentary giving the

opposing point of view ( cf. Godard: "The way to criticize a film is to make another film.") speaks

for itself; namely that Michael Moore did a good job and from the point of view of the general

public, it would be a better option to effect bans on assault rifles than not to.

In statistics, we learn of a concept known as chance variation. Michael Moore often

employed this to his advantage. As the length of the interview increases, the probability that theone whom is interviewed messes up tends asymptotically to one. As a result, Michael Moore by

showing only the part where the people mess up, often can make people say outlandishly stupid

comments. This is what he did with the homeowner when he asked about the second

amendment.

Interestingly, Michael Moore creates a perceived effect of closing the president of the

NRA in when talking about points. Michael Moore fails to include in the movie all of his counters

and the point in the interview where Charlton Heston simply walks out of the interview.

However, there are not strict lies throughout the film. The fact that he has an opinion

over this matter should not be too heavily scrutinized. Michael Moore presented a variety offocused, well thought out ideas. At the very least(a fortiori), one can use the ideas presented for

mental stimulation on the proper viewpoint for gun control (as opposed to listening to the

documentary like the bible[which I think should not be read in the non-critical manner that is in

now])