Does that imply you'd support an armed insurrection? That seems pretty extreme! And if not, then why exactly do these people need guns?
It implies that I support the right to self defense - including against an oppressive regime and the enforcers thereof. Specifically, it implies that I support the exercise of that right among the class of people typically excluded from it. Violence is the last resort, but it is a resort nonetheless.
"Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary" -- Karl Marx
"That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there." -- George Orwell
"A man's rights rest in three boxes. The ballot box, jury box and the cartridge box." -- Frederick Douglass
> And if not, then why exactly do these people need guns?
Because even when a government is not actively oppressing its people, it is demonstrably (with considerable regularity) incapable of protecting each and every one of its citizens from one another. Like the saying goes: when seconds count, the police are an hour away. Every person has the right to ensure one's own safety and security, even if their government can't or won't ensure it for them.
And that's entirely ignoring things like non-combative use of firearms, like hunting or pest control or defense against predators or marksmanship or what have you. Quite frankly: the purpose for one's ownership of a firearm is the business of none but oneself.
I can potentially see this in rural areas. Not so much in urban areas, where the police are much nearer and it seems that the guns are the main conveyer of harm.
I don't think you can ignore that they are also used in offence, not just defence. I live in the UK and I don't need a gun to defend myself, because any attacker is extremely unlikely to have one either (because the penalty for even being found carrying one is so severe that it's not worth the risk for them). One of the best ways in which a government can protect its' citizens from each other is removing dangerous weapons from their possession!
I guess my question is: what are you scared of? To my mind the most likely thing to be a victim of is burglary, in which case isn't it much better to just let the robbery take place (and then claim on insurance) while being safe and unharmed than to risk being shot in an armed conflict? Seems to me you make yourself less safe not safer by bringing guns into the equation.
Unless you have a cop on every street corner (and even then), you wouldn't have enough coverage for cop intervention to be something upon which you can rely for your own safety. At best, they might catch your assailant after you're already dead.
> I live in the UK and I don't need a gun to defend myself, because any attacker is extremely unlikely to have one either
You're ignoring the vast differences in available socioeconomic safety nets between the US and the UK. The UK's still pretty shitty on those metrics (which is why there's no shortage of violent crime), but it's certainly better than here in the US.
> I guess my question is: what are you scared of?
I'm scared of my government deciding that it's time to round up everyone of $ETHNICITY or $RELIGION or $IDEOLOGY or $SEXUALITY or what have you and send them off to internment camps. I'm scared of white supremacists deciding it's time to bring lynch mobs back into fashion. I'm scared of the ownership class using the state to coerce (with increasing severity) the working class into continuing to work despite continuing to get the increasingly short end of the stick. I'm scared of theocrats deciding that "separation of church and state" is no longer necessary and therefore empowering themselves to impose their own religion (or more precisely: a very twisted and corrupted version of it) on every other American. I'm scared of GSRMs losing the rights we had just so recently won.
> isn't it much better to just let the robbery take place (and then claim on insurance)
It would be much better to deter the robbery in the first place. It would be much better than that to give people a safety net such that they don't have to resort to robbery in the first place.