this is an excellent observation and it is actually the point of nucleation from which my current point of view was spawned. one can imagine a kind of scale that could be used to rate an individual person. left to their own devices, in many, many different scenarios, what kind of behaviour does that person exhibit? maybe the scale could be non-violent to violent or un-productive to productive. it is tempting to abandon the idea of "rating" people because people are complex, and their behaviour changes depending on the situation and various other factors. but there are examples that show that such a scale is useful. but we all know, anecdotally, that people can be rated on such a scale. people who benefit from great parents and mentors, who had excellent educations, had excellent nutrition and so on, reside on the more positive end of the scale.

so the people are the building blocks from which a society is built. everything in that society is a function of the people. so it is possible to assess a given society on a similar scale to the people: a certain society that has a certain distribution of certain kinds of people will experience certain outcomes. let us imagine that we take a large sample of societies and subject them to this idea where everyone gets their own personal nuclear weapon. in fact, lets boil it down to its logical core: let us imagine that every single person in society is given a button. if they press the button, the entire society will be instantly destroyed. they are all aware of this when they get their button.

on one extreme side of the scale or spectrum, a society filled with extremely smart, well educated, well adjusted and emotionally healthy people who all have great jobs and lives, in other words a properly structured society filled with very good people, not a single instance of button pressing would occur. you could in fact give each person the power to end the world and the world would go on unharmed. this is the goal. it can never be achieved because sometimes people go insane or have a bad break up or what have you, but its no different than an electronic device trying to use power as efficiently as possible: electronics strive for zero power consumption and societies should strive to reach the point where the aforementioned scenario is possible.

now we look at the real world. we see that gun control, voting, and all kinds of other things are actually the same thing: different ways in which citizens are trusted or not trusted with power. we see that in a healthy democracy or republic, the vote is far more powerful than the gun. we see that any healthy democracy or republic requires that its citizens are up to the task of handling power responsibly. and i think that if you agree with all the previous statements, you agree that much of the western world is in a lot of trouble right now. and say that without even the smallest shred of arrogance or snobbery.

so, this leads to a very interesting consideration of the limits of power that the citizens of the united states or the united kingdom might handle before something bad happened. and it is also fun to consider what the maximum amount of power the citizens are capable of handling after some kind of focused effort to make them ready. how much power could they handle if schools and jobs and everything were made better? what is the best outcome we might hope to achieve?

so the answer to your questions is that no, individuals probably shouldnt have nukes but they could probably handle some really dangerous stuff like chemical weapons or heavy machine guns if you just gave them the tools they need.