I met an older Australian woman that sailed around the world solo, and swore by the fake dog for scaring off opportunistic pirates. She didn’t carry a gun or other weapon. Just a cassette tape on repeat when anchored.
Second, say you solve the above and decide to deploy the gun. You don't have a lot of time, and you don't know if the approaching boat is a pirate or a local fisherman who wants to sell you a fish. Make the wrong call, and bad things happen.
Say you solved the permit/registration issue by hiding the gun and then you deploy the gun. Bad things happen. Ok, it might have been justified and might have saved your life, but you are still probably going to jail for not declaring the weapon.
(My thinking being: pirates generally use speedboats, and a harpoon gun is plenty good at shooting holes in fiberglass and/or destroying outboard motors; and so pirates wouldn't want to get near your boat if you had one. But this sort of setup is not really useful for shooting at people — especially people less than 50ft away from the boat, which puts them in a "blind spot" for aiming, and especially not people who have already boarded — and so it would be irrelevant when docked.)
What is that? Brave Search showed results for Carvana, and I clicked "show me reaults for carfanyl," and it then showed me results for Carvana and Carnival.
Google Search just shows your comment.
While there are USCG-compliant flare guns, you also cannot satisfy SOLAS requirements with a flare gun. You need to carry (depending on voyage and vessel) handheld distress, collision avoidance, and/or paraflares.
Is your argument that death is preferable to jail?
My argument is that a method of defense that carries a jail sentence if it succeeds is suboptimal.
We're talking about a handgun not a artillery peice, "deployment" is taking it out of a biometric gun safe, 5 seconds max. Also you wouldn't open fire on someone just beacuse they are near your boat.
Where do you aim the gun? At them? At the deck?
They see you are holding a gun, get a different look on their face, and one starts to reach under the seat.
What do you do?
Remember you are in a foreign country and don't speak the language, don't know the customs, cannot read the body language, ...
Nothing. You don't aim a firearm at anything you don't want to destroy. Until they take action like attempting to board the vessel, you don't even want them to know you have it. Keep it concealed until you need it.
In this situation the first thing you want to reach for is the radio. The gun is more for situations where you would be below deck sleeping and hear someone kicking in the door. Going up against a fully armed team of men isn't possible as a single person with small arms, small arms are useful for one or two burglars breaking into boats on the slip though.
Criminal doesn’t mean stupid - and you’re not going to bother with a risky target when there are other, less risky targets nearby.
1) If there is a dog on the boat, maybe there's people too.
2) Plenty of other boats, why bother killing a dog and make lots of noise?
Exactly. A lot of people seem to forget that a gun discharging is even louder than a dog, so a would-be amateur pirate would be solving a small problem by creating a much bigger one.
People have guns in rural areas everywhere. There are some exceptions like China where guns are very uncommon but if you are traveling through Eastern Europe, or Africa, or rural parts of south Asia you are going to encounter a lot of people who have guns.
There isn’t a gun culture like in the US in these places though, so you’ll have to know what to look for.
"gun culture" and people waving hand guns around for crime or "self defence" is, thankfully, limited to a small number of failed states, and the United States.
Also, the one subgroup of villages who do have guns are actual mafia members. But their power is mainly in organization and in having bought cops. You having own gun will in no way help you if you are targetted. The rest of people have them generally only if they need them for job, very rarely otherwise.
Villagers don't have guns for fun either all that much, it is also costly. The self defense laws are also such that gun is likely yo get you in serious trouble.
Granted, I did research on proxy gun rate estimators many years ago, using even older data, so it is possible that things have changed but I don't see why that would be the case.
Lots of people in the police or other security forces have access to guns. Often people who have done military service have an issued gun at home (eg Switzerland I think). Military service generally overlaps with a time in life when males are more vulnerable to suicide.
In most of the world, if you want to do a robbery, carrying a gun is not a sane option. You are more likely to end up in jail or dead or both.
Companies that provide armed security for cargo ships for example will keep the weapons on a boat at sea in international waters, transfer them to the cargo ship at the beginning of their security detail, then take them off with another boat before the cargo ship proceeds.
I also think some (almost certainly American) people underestimate how big an issue importing a firearm or possession of an unlicensed firearm can be in most of the world. It’s either many months of paperwork and almost guaranteed refusal, or risking many years in prison for an unlicensed firearm.