You sound reasonable you should acquire a firearm if you want. By the way if you're looking for a good community of left leaning responsible gun owners check out /r/liberalgunowners on reddit. Most gun communities can be more right leaning due to selection bias.
I firmly subscribe to the "you don't draw/aim your gun unless you intent to kill" methodology and I believe I could handle pulling the trigger and the aftermath. It's not a toy and I would never treat it as such. Thank you for your other suggestions, I had considered the last one but the first 2 were things I didn't know existed or I hadn't thought about them.