>You can shoot someone that rams your door to open it.

So somebody destroys a door and that entitles you to take their life?

I think in both situations you should just refrain from shooting at all. Seems to work in most of the rest of the world..

If the door is locked, and they break in, you are not shooting them because they broke a lock. You are shooting them because theyve shown criminal intent by forcibly making their way through a locked door.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_doctrine

But the basic idea is that the natural right of self-defense extends to certain areas, including one's home. (That is, you do not have to wait until the intruder has his hands around your neck in order to defend yourself.) If you would prefer to not be allowed to defend yourself, that's you. In many countries (not just the US) invading people's homes makes for a dangerous and short career, as it should.

But Americans know that this (a pre-shooting checklist) isn't a reason for door locks for every American. And I'd guess it only is for a small minority of Americans.

The number one, by far most effective thing you do comes well ahead of those armed, home entry thieves, and that is you make your home scream "GO AWAY!"

Get a dog

Employ great lighting

Put the home alarm stickers on, actual alarm optional, [3]

Clean up.

Etc...

The criminals work on risk reward. You can bias that equation away from favorable meaning the baddies pick another home, not yours.

From there, should you really feel this scenario could happen, maybe consider a gun. But if you do, please get gun education. One bad scenario is to have a gun, and face experienced users. Your chance of getting you, and or family, hurt go way up!

I do mostly identify with the left, but am gun friendly having grown up rural and well educated about guns.

[3] - no joke! Neighbors had done the sticker thing for roughly a decade. That, plus the other suggestions work well.

If that's your definition of "hard", I'd say you're setting that bar far too low.

Is that assertion based on study or "common sense?" It may well be that they don't feel the need to bring a gun because they know their victims are definitely not going to be armed anyways.

The real question would, do the criminals not use a weapon at all, or do they use weapons that just don't happen to be guns?

> broad social safety net that reduces poverty

People aren't being shot in the US because of poverty. The _majority_ of "gun violence" in the US is actually suicides. It's nearly 2/3 of that terrible statistical category. The remainder of murders typically involve alcohol and arguments.

The majority of murder victims in the US know their murderer by name and have been acquainted with them for years. Means. Motive. Opportunity. These things don't change.

If the legal rule is "you can't shoot anybody", which is what the post I responded to said, wouldn't that make it impossible to legally obtain weapons? Why just "hard"?

If, OTOH, you mean make it hard to illegally obtain weapons, where has this actually been done successfully? My reading of human history is that criminals who want weapons have always been able to get them somehow.

> The US thinking to me seams to go along the lines of handing out nuclear weapons to everybody so forces are balanced...

I don't know where you are getting that from. The US thinking is very simple: since it is impossible for governments to prevent all violent crimes or to ensure that police show up in time to protect citizens from being harmed by violent crime, citizens must be allowed to have the means of self defense. The best way to minimize the number of citizens that feel the need to have weapons for self-defense is to extirpate crime--but unfortunately the US in recent decades has been moving in the opposite direction.