A person and their family are 3x more likely to be shot if they have a gun in their house, so "defence" isn't a great reason to have a gun.
Guns might serve some purposes in some situations. It's just an incredibly lousy tool for "defending ourselves", with negative utility on average.
If you have a source, it would help.
Gun ownership has benefits, but safety is not one of them.
Much like how most home robberies take place in the day, the perception of safety from gun ownership is at odds with reality. Hell, you are 25% more likely to be robbed in Alaska than New York State.
Another point to make is that there's an undercurrent of personal responsibility. The danger presented by having a gun in your home is something that can be managed if you are a responsible gun owner, but the risk of violence against your self is not something you can easily control. This is the important part, owning a gun for self defense is not about making you safer, it's about transferring the risk from something you have no control over to something you have some measure of control over.
Thus, arguing that owning guns increase your risk of dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wounds holds no weight with people who want to own guns, since it's a fundamental misunderstanding of why one would want to own a gun for self defense.
That said, feeling more secure is by far the most likely situation. While it’s far safer to leave your house in the event of a home invasion than to confront the robbers. Feeling like you can defend yourself is empowering.
Also, you cannot really measure how often a gun saves a life. On the other hand, you can measure the number of gun accidents and according to Wikipedia they’re less than 1% of gun related deaths which puts them at about 130 per year. IIRC staircases kill about 350 people per year (US numbers).
I would advocate some kind of mandatory safety training for gun owners, but it’s really not the big point here. Measures like banning guns altogehter, I think, miss the point as well. Some places seem to do well with high gun ownership rates, so there must be something else at play that causes the US’s high rates of gun violence. More effort should be put into examining and fixing that in place of steamroller tactics and fearmongering like in that Vox article.
It’s false to say it’s extremely rare.
Partly this is because there is little reporting and data collection that can capture situations where a gun is presented but not fired, but also because of the deterrent effect.
I do — it's a constitutional right because it is a fundamental ('essential') human right. A free citizen (i.e., not a child or prisoner) has a right to wield violence in defense of himself, others and property; to restrict that right (as opposed to restricting unjust exercises of violence) is IMHO fundamentally unjust.
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/08/03/42901...
And here you have a more Soviet styled recipe for eggs:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/chart-of-the-day-us-g...
Someone with a >3x greater than average likelyhood of getting shot might bring it down to 3x by having a gun themselves.
Probably we should start with television. Sure, people get some enjoyment from owning a TV, but think of how much they aren't exercising. Surely owning a TV dramatically increases the probability you are going to be obese and eventually develop heart disease. You are way more likely to watch a TV if you have a TV in your own house.
We should probably allow people to buy and sell whatever they want. Who cares if hitmen murder people, the people demand more hitmen!!! Hitmen can kill people that want to kill me, which makes me feel safe!!! Who cares if my judgement is extremely arbitrary and the hitmen are 3x more likely to shoot me than the people I want killed. Awesome. You've really opened my eyes here.
For all the other laws we can evaluate them based uhhhh, not on their pros and cons.
Once upon a time, there was a wise Zen master. People traveled from far away to seek his help. In return, he would teach them and show them the way to enlightenment. On this particular day, a scholar came to visit the master for advice. “I have come to ask you to teach me about Zen,” the scholar said. Soon, it became obvious that the scholar was full of his own opinions and knowledge. He interrupted the master repeatedly with his own stories and failed to listen to what the master had to say. The master calmly suggested that they should have tea. So the master poured his guest a cup. The cup was filled, yet he kept pouring until the cup overflowed onto the table, onto the floor, and finally onto the scholar’s robes. The scholar cried “Stop! The cup is full already. Can’t you see?” “Exactly,” the Zen master replied with a smile. “You are like this cup — so full of ideas that nothing more will fit in. Come back to me with an empty cup.”
https://medium.com/the-mission/empty-your-cup-a-zen-proverb-...