When the mobs came to a town next door last year, I knew the safety of my family hinged on which street they were going to choose to go down next, and my own ability to respond.

I watched them smash windows and set fires with zero police response. Any doubts I may have had about my gun collection went out the window that night.

The "guns as fire extinguisher" analogy is apt. It wasn't likely that a mob would threaten my neighborhood, just as it isn't likely any particular person's house will ever catch fire. But I will remain prepared.

The poster to whom I replied was citing averages, which are useless in the context of a large, diverse place like the US with a non-uniform distribution.

The average murder rate in the US is a distraction, except to point out (as I did) that obviously people aren't dropping like flies. If any significant fraction of those 300M guns were killing people, the average would be several orders of magnitude higher than it is.

Go ahead and exercise your personal rights to defend yourself and your family as you see fit based on your values and risk profile.

The averages neither support the idea that we should ban guns, nor that we should all get one. Because, again, averages are pretty useless -- but that's the context of the current thread of discussion, so I felt a need to respond.

EDIT: major rewording for clarity.

> Probably more to do with policing structure.

And culture.

Specifically, cultural homogeneity makes a nation much easier to run. Boring food, though.

Japan has pretty good food for being homogenous.

Love Japanese food. Not sure I'd want to eat it for every meal for the rest of my life. I bet a large part of why I love it is that it's one choice among many.

Boring food can be good, but maybe there are fewer types of restaurants per capita.

You can have more variety with a few types of restaurants than with lots of types of restaurants, I doubt the two are completely correlated.

Another person who doesn't have fire extinguishers in his home, car or place of work, doesn't buy any insurance unless it's mandated, etc.

No seat belts, either. They drive safely, therefore they won't get in a car accident.

You said, "the U.S. murder rate is not all that remarkable". Someone pointed out that claim is demonstrably false. So your response is, "is getting murdered a real concern?" You established a metric, and when it was shown not to support your world view, you try to discredit your own metric. That's called moving the goal post. It is not something a "rational person" does.

An irrational person uses irrelevant data as justification to ignore preventable deaths. We're not talking about how many car wrecks, or heart attacks, or rabid vending machines are out there, we're talking about gun-related homicide and suicide. Preventable deaths that we can prevent just like every other first world country does, but we just choose not to.

I think the point was that the rate is low enough that the risk of being murdered is not a concern for most people most of the time - yes, it is abnormally high relative to other countries, but it's also so low that it's extremely unlikely to be an individual's cause of death.

Your odds of being murdered in the U.S. are very low compared to many other ways of dying (see e.g. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db395.htm), so yeah, it'd be great to see the murder rate lowered (that's always good, right?), but even if you did something drastic that managed to cut the odds in half, it would not have any discernible impact on most people's day to day lives nor on their ultimate cause of death because so few people end up dying that way.