[quote]The second amendment ensures the right of individuals to own guns.[/quote]The "right of individuals" is only true as of the Heller case in 2008. Before then, according to the Supreme Court, the "militia clause" trumped "bear arms" clause, which meant only state-militias had a right to bear arms. [url=http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/12/jeffrey-toobin-second-amendment.html]You can thank the NRA for that "reinterpretation"[/url].[quote]For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.[/quote] The second paragraph is a bit of a mess. You argue opinion polls cannot be used to form an opinion, yet they can, because that's what an opinion poll is - a poll of opinions. What it seems like you are alluding to is the use of opinion polls to show that gun control should be enforced (to whatever degree) instead of looking at research (the statistics) on the matter. Again, this was evident in the final couple of sentences where you bring up argumentum ad populum without tying that into a context where such opinion polls would not be relevant, such as constitutional interpretations of the second amendment. If you can do that, you'll have a far more persuasive argument. [quote]In fact, civilians use guns two million times a year to prevent violence (Watkins 28).[/quote]Since you argue it is "necessary to know the related facts and statistics", you should know this particular statistic has been debunked by the Department of Justice. [quote]A big part of the gun advocates’ world view appears to be the belief that they are surrounded by criminal threats that they need to be heavily armed to ward off. And so, virtually any time gun safety legislation comes up, they jump to the argument that stricter gun laws will reduce the ability of law-abiding people to defend themselves. In support, they point to a [url=http://www.guncite.com/gcdgklec.html]series of surveys[/url], including the most prominent one by [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kleck]Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck[/url], that estimated there to be anywhere from 760,000 to 3.6 million defensive gun uses (“DGUs”) every year. By contrast, the U.S. Department of Justice’s [url=http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2013/0130/Gun-control-101-Do-Americans-often-use-firearms-in-self-defense]Bureau of Justice Statistics (“BJS”)[/url] found that there were around 62,200 DGUs to protect people, and another 20,000 DGUs to protect property, every year. In a [url=https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/165476.pdf]1997 report[/url], the U.S. DOJ’s National Institute of Justice (“NIJ”) thoroughly debunked the surveys by Kleck and others that found as many as 3.6 million DGUs per year. As the NIJ report explained, the results of the Kleck surveys would suggest the “absurd” conclusion that more women defended themselves with a gun from -blam!- than the total number of -blam!-s that occurred. Similarly, if the survey results were accurate, it would mean that 36% of robberies, and 19% of aggravated assaults were warded off by a DGU. And, most unrealistically, it would mean that approximately 130,000 criminals were wounded or killed by a DGU. Such high levels of DGUs would not only be readily obvious to the police, statisticians, and the media, but it would also likely drive a lot of criminals out of business. Yet there is no evidence suggesting anywhere near such high levels of DGUs. The NIJ report also identifies three likely flaws that lead the surveys by Kleck and others to vastly overstate the number of DGUs per year. First, the estimates are based on extrapolations from very small sample sizes, which makes the results inherently unreliable and subject to the impact of false positives. Second, some people are likely to overstate or falsely answer questions regarding DGUs in an effort to impress the interviewer or due to actual confusion. And third, many individuals who tell a survey taker that they engaged in a DGUs might not be innocent victims of crime, but instead may be engaged in criminal activity that led to the need to use a gun in self-defense. A 2000 Harvard study by Hemenway, Azreal, and Miller found that [url=http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/6/4/263.full]gun owners use their guns to threaten or intimidate far more often than in legitimate self-defense, and their panel of criminal court judges – who were instructed to treat the gun owners’ reports as factually accurate – found most claims were not legal self-defense[/url]. In short, the claims of high levels of DGUs made by gun advocates are shaky at best.[/quote][url=http://www.winningprogressive.org/shooting-down-more-nra-myths]Source[/url]