Arm Sales Topic Proposal

[LQuinn92]

Dear Community,

Please find attached an arm sales topic controversy paper.

Warm regards,
Lee Quinn

[japoapst]

I would like to echo support for a shared topic. I know it has been a controversial stance to take for many, but I believe the authors of this paper present a compelling argument that we are no longer in a position to focus our worry on the potential it may have for high school policy debaters' predilection to use college cards instead of doing their own research when we are at a point where policy debate is being completely slashed in many HS regions in favor of public forum due to inadequate ability to garner coaching and evidence to support a policy team.

The ability to invite local Virginia schools to our own novice meetings under a shared topic gives me massive hope that we at Mason could take a step towards bolstering Virginia policy debate in this world. We have found that when PF debaters come to Mason and are forced into JV, their likelihood to quit is very high. Barring a decision to go back to the novice eligibility rule that allows PF, any proposal that increases the potential for local debaters to come in with policy experience instead of PF experience is one I heavily support.

Jackie Poapst

[LQuinn92]

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.pdf

Second, 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.