I love how you downplay the act of someone robbing you of your food supply which could very possibly lead to you and your families starvation.

I know people who were isolated by a large ice storm for several days. They took in neighbours who didn't have heat.

I can't speak for others, but I'm prepping for a 10-15 day breakdown of the system.

As a pragmatic matter, if society is in a situation where somebody is willing to die to get a hold of my month's supply of baked beans then I'll probably be willing to kill them. As a general principle, I donate my still long from expired canned food every year when I replace it fresh.

If all you have is a few month's supply of baked beans, and someone is trying to take it by force...

Seriously? I would use barricades, tazers, pepper spray, traps, smoke, fire, light, sound, and other means to dissuade the thief. Someone with their ears pounding from 125dB alarms, lungs choked with smoke, eyes streaked with pepper spray, skin on fire and body pulsing with 40,000 volts probably is not too concerned with my beans - if they could get past the steel-reinforced door.

People with guns don't seem to consider any other factor, besides that if the opponent has a gun, or can get yours away, you're not in a good defense position anyway. Guns are mainly useful for offense. Maybe that's why some preppers want them.

> I would use barricades, tazers, pepper spray, traps, smoke, fire, light, sound, and other means to dissuade the thief

You have time for all that? Using a tazer or peper spray means your basically in well within pistol range and very close to hand-to-hand range. How exactly are you going to deploy your sound or smoke weapon?

> Guns are mainly useful for offense. Maybe that's why some preppers want them.

Guns are plenty useful for defense. Have you ever received any gun training?

Seriously? You've just changed the scenario completely.

If the person trying to steal my beans will go away if I say "stop I have a gun" or simply barricade my door then I'm sure as hell not shooting them. It's a last resort.

I am hoping to never need to use my emergency kit again.

Also, you should talk to cops about pepper spray, tasers, etc. and how often they fail.

And you should talk to cops about the effectiveness of attackers with blades against a trained officer with a holstered weapon closer than 21 feet. But both those and the pepper spray/taser fails are outliers, they are not the norm.

In a last resort, I don't want my attacker using my weapon against me, and if they can, I don't want it to be fatal. Which is why I don't carry knives for self defense, even though i'm trained in eskrima.

This is getting into absurd levels of hypotheticals so I'm tapping out.

Your solution is to add multiple layers of complexity, which you then must rely upon?

The care and use of a gun (especially in combat, in close quarters and urban environments) adds multiple layers of complexity.

I would rely on multiple layers of complexity for defense, since that's how modern security design works. A gun is a single point of failure. A shelter or person full of extremely undesirable defenses is more reliable, less dangerous, and probably much easier to stock.

I agree that it is wise to avoid a single point of failure, and that multiple layers of security could prove quite useful. All that I am advocating is that a gun is just another viable layer of security.

Prepping for any scenario, prioritizing those that are most likely.

Who is to say the people in this hypothetical situation just want our "baked beans"?

Okay, so that question was too specific.

New question: is the reason one might want to have a gun in an emergency simply to be able to injure, maim or kill someone regardless of a specific reason?

If you say it's "for defense", remember that the concept is subjective; a robber being beaten for stealing may fear for their life and "defend" themselves. Specific reasons are less controversial and more practical.

It is really a simple matter.

I want to help maintain or improve the welfare of those I care about, regardless of scenario.

In order to achieve this outcome, it is usually sufficient to go to work, invest, and partake in mutually fulfilling rituals.

For the edge cases, a gun might be useful. And, in this thread, it is the edge cases that we are discussing.