Dear Community,
I wanted to post a few words to answer some potential questions before the topic vote Thursday. And thanks so much for the kind works Jackie. I also would love to turn Samford into a platform for helping local Birmingham schools be able to brainstorm and practice with our team.
First, please find attached the HS Topic Paper. This is largely for easy access.
https://www.nfhs.org/media/1019426/reduce-arms-sales.pdfSecond, my paper is intentionally ambiguous about deviating from the HS topic. I felt as is if this would best be a process handled during the topic wording part of the process. In my opinion, I think the college topic should says "reduce its sale of arms and services” and provide a topic country list. This mechanism for college would be broader than the HS topic (not so much so as to make research irrelevant, just may permit one or two smaller affs in the college world) while a topic country list could help cleave out niches for high school teams who do not want to run into college arguments. For instance, if Egypt is not one of the topic country list for college, a high school team could read an Egypt aff. But, the fact of the matter is the HS topic does not have a country list. This is terrifying the HS community (rightfully so, not having a country list makes this topic massive) and so any amount of double-dipping by the community would directly benefit HS.
Lastly, I'll readily admit that the paper I submitted is not fully fleshed out in terms of evidence. The fact of the matter is that I was unaware of the deadline for submission (first time, some confusion, etc.) so. I merely wanted to advance the arguments about why parallelism in the community is good. I was not that concerned with fleshing out certain affs/da's on the topic, because I knew that the HS paper had largely done these things and people generally know what the arm sales lit is about (its pretty basic all things considered).
Again, I strongly believe that this is a wonderful opportunity to share a great topic and experiment with ways to grow the community.