That doesn't follow. I'm probably much more likely to be electrocuted because my house has electricity, but that doesn't mean electricity doesn't serve its purpose.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/chart-of-the-day-us-g...
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: