It's also easier to accidentally kill people using a gun. And it's a lot easier to kill or injure the wrong person. A gun is effectively a killswitch. It's a thing for making people not be alive anymore.

The question you should be asking yourself is not "Do I need a gun?" (the answer to which seems to be "yes", which should worry you more than that you might not be allowed to have one) but "Why do I need a gun?".

Incidentally, in Germany you can get a gun license for self-defense reasons. But only in very well-defined, very rare and very extreme circumstances.

If the average person needs a gun, the society is extremely broken. In some parts of the world -- mostly the so-called third world but apparently also many places in the US -- the society really is that broken.

The long-term answer to a broken society isn't arming the populace. It's fixing the society so it's no longer broken.

Guns turn many non-violent crimes into violent crimes already, just by being widely available. If a criminal has to expect to face a frightened, potentially very lethally armed individual in the course of their crime, they are more likely to plan for that eventuality and bring a gun or lethal weapon when they wouldn't have had to otherwise.

The only thing more worrying than a frightened normal person with a gun is someone who is already in such a mess that they knowingly engage in an activity where they will likely have to face such a person (or some theoretical hard-boiled vigilante, though that's the far less likely encounter in practice).

Instead we need to prevent those crimes in the first place. I know this is a very un-American concept, but every crime is a failure of society. Not just because the powers that be should have interfered in the process of committing that crime but because the criminal shouldn't have been allowed to become a criminal in the first place.

An overwhelming amount of crime is the direct or indirect result of social problems and drug politics. Society being broken isn't normal, even when it seems pathological. Prevent crimes and you save lives, give people guns and your best chance is that you add more "bad people" to the bodycount.

There are exactly two groups of people we want to have the legal permission to use lethal weapons in the course of their duty: soldiers and the police.

Soldiers sacrifice their humanity to protect society from external harm. They're trained to overcome their natural inhibition to murder people in cold blood because that's what they are up against. That's why we should respect veterans, we shouldn't aspire to become like them. They're essentially trained to act like sociopathic murderers if necessary. It's a failure of mankind that we still need them at all.

The police on the other hand shouldn't kill people. The act of shooting to kill in hostage situations is called "Finaler Rettungsschuss" in German -- literally, a "final rescue shot" or more figuratively a "last resort". During normal duty a police officer shouldn't even unholster their weapon -- which seems obvious if you consider that you should only aim a gun at something you plan to destroy.

In the UK, normal police officers don't even carry guns on them in the first place -- although the terrorism scare has led to heavily armed policemen (in effect, untrained soldiers) showing up in various places. This should seem obvious: the chance of facing an armed criminal willing to seriously injure or kill police officers is extremely low and if someone seeks out to specifically do so they'll likely not give sufficient advance warning to shoot them.

But of course this isn't very helpful in the US where you can't even expect the police not to harm or abuse you.

Yes, it's probably legitimate to want a gun (and want to be trained in its use and learn to use it against other humans) in places like some parts of the US. But I think it's solving the wrong problem. You're trying to fix a broken pipe with band-aids. Just think: if your society is so broken you need a tool for murdering humans just so you're reasonably safe in the course of your normal life today, what will it be like tomorrow? And what are you doing to change the course -- at least for yourself and your loved ones?