The extreme route is all most here will understand, and even then it's not very often...Yes gun can be used to very easily kill people but their "purpose" is just to fire a projectile at high velocity, the end result of that is entirely up to the person controlling it. Other items in modern culture kill people very easily as well, and with much greater frequency (cars for instance), while you may not think it is their primary function they do so with great efficiency daily.
I think you have to admit that this is a pretty disingenuous argument. Cars are not built to kill people, their primary purpose is transport. Manufacturers build cars partly with the view of keeping the occupant safe but also to reduce the number of accidents.
This cannot be said about firearms. Just one example straight off the bat: Armour-piercing rounds. There's probably another hundred examples of the industry striving to produce a better killing machine.
No you probably won't understand, you've been raised in an entirely different environment with a different mind set, police are not there to protect you and they are incapable of doing so, they are there to clean up after the fact and find the person responsible if they can, in the moment you are all you can count on to protect yourself and those you love. Your world is entirely different than ours, we have a much larger criminal element ready to kill for any reason, or none at all...
Aren't they? I guess I must have misunderstood the US police force's motto "to protect and to serve". I guess it's just a silly assumption of mine that police patrol the streets to try and spot a situation that either has already broken the law or is about to so they can defuse it. I'm pretty sure that their presence on the streets is to also act as a deterrent. What you described is almost a janitor.
Re: "your world is entirely different from ours" - so how many people have you hospitalised and/or killed in self-defence? Personally, if I felt that the situation in the country I lived in was so bad that the average stupid person was better off being armed, it wouldn't be far off living in a war zone. If I couldn't do enough to try and improve the living conditions in the country, I would move to another country. I would ask why crime rates are so high that the average person ought to be armed. Stupid people like to do stupid macho things, why on earth would you want a system that allows them another way to show off how stupid they are.
I could understand Americans a bit better if the vast majority of opinion was on the side of "well, we consider them an unfortunate necessity but we're trying to improve the system so that one day we won't need them any more", but there seem to be an enormous amount of people who consider it their god-given right / penis extension, and you couldn't pry it from their cold, dead hands.
Another issue in my opinion is the difference in what would be regarded as a "clear-cut case" which kind of worries me because I wonder what erodes peoples' sensibilities on this front. It's one thing to shoot someone who invades your home during sleeping hours (gun laws aside, I think this is acceptable). The 'pharmacist shoots dead' thread on this forum makes me think that a lot of people believe in revenge rather than self-defence.
Here's an old case in the UK that I think is very borderline:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Martin_%28farmer%29
It caused a huge amount of controversy in the UK, public opinion was divided. On one hand, two people broke into someone's home to steal stuff, and even though they were fleeing when they were shot, and to a certain extent I believe that someone who tries to burgle someone's home deserves what's coming to them, but on the other hand, neither burglar was armed, they weren't threatening the life of anyone, and they were fleeing. A shotgun is not an ideal weapon to incapacitate a person without threatening that person's life. The farmer shot them out of revenge rather than self-defence. However, I think that too great a percentage of Americans would class this as "clear cut", no charges should have been pressed against the farmer and well done to him.
And if someone was, say, raping my girlfriend, yeah I'd have no real issue shooting him in the moment. I'm not saying I'd enjoy it, but it would be justified and I would sleep well within a few nights I think. In the meantime my guns have shot nothing more alive than pictures on paper in the years I've owned them, and I hope it stays that way. How does this mentality preclude me from responsible gun ownership in your mind?
The law can't work by only allowing "the good/sensible guys" guns. Even if someone is somehow deemed to be good/sensible, it doesn't mean that they will be good/sensible in every circumstance.
And frankly I've been in 3 or 4 scenarios in my life where I was saved as much by luck as good judgment. The most demonstrable of which being I once prevented a would-be robbery by pretending I had a gun, and I once got a death glare from a confirmed gang-banger. The other cases were simply being in dangerous environments in general where crime was known to be high, and feeling the need to avoid certain people/groups I observed such that I changed my route (I was walking) multiple times. Point being: If my luck had gone sour, I would have like a gun as a fallback.
Just a quick point here, there are some very dodgy areas in the UK too (some parts of south / east London from personal experience, other cities too).
In a society where guns are commonplace, if your luck had gone sour, then chances are that your assailants would have guns as well, you would be outnumbered by people who are much more likely to be experienced (and therefore the temperament) to kill you, as well as spotting the signs that you're about to pull a gun. I would prefer to live somewhere where they're a lot less likely to have a gun than in your scenario.