i have no interest in firearms: none in learning about them, owning
them, or using them. i am broadly, personally "anti-gun," mostly for
practical reasons. to own a gun is to put yourself and anyone with
whom you share a home at risk of serious or fatal injury, and the
trade-off of hypothetically being able to scare off an intruder does
not seem worth it to me. the statistics on gun ownership are clear:
simply owning a firearm puts you at much higher risk of suicide. gun
suicides are significantly more common than gun homicides in the US,
and the use of firearms in the commission of a crime is more common
than the use of firearms in self-defense by an order of magnitude.
the data offer little cause for belief that guns are particularly
useful for home defense. they are akin to pickup trucks: useful in a
narrow set of circumstances, which don't apply to the vast majority
of people who own and use them, for whom they function primarily or
exclusively as a signifier of masculinity.

even granting the "self-defense" premise, there are other problems.
i think the usual suburban fantasy of self-defense is at base anti-
social and morally unjustifiable, even before we get to the veiled
racial animus that often underpins it. locke famously argues in his
/second treatise/ that in the state of nature anyone can justifiably
kill a robber because there exists no common authority to establish
penalties proportional to any offense---that is, one is justified in
killing a robber because there is no recourse to law or courts, and
one cannot trust that the robber will stop at robbery absent them.
in the absence of a social contract, one is potentially at war with
any other person at a moment's notice. this is the headspace many US
gun owners occupy. they begin from the assumption that the social
compact is null and void, thus all offenses are potentially capital.
perversely, this does not actually coincide with a breakdown of the
established order of law enforcement, but a sprawling, authoritarian
expansion of it. so the household armory invariably pairs with the
other trappings of suburban hitlerism: security cameras and alarms
that connect directly to the police department, lawn signs that
alert anyone who so much as looks at your house of their existence,
and routine escalation to vigilante assaults and homicides of people
who are just walking down a public street, or who had the misfortune
to knock on the wrong door.

this brings us to why the "revolutionary" argument for gun ownership
is facetious at best. the standard second amendment argument is that
citizens ought to be armed to prepare themselves against tyrannical
government overreach. outside of a few armed cells (and even within
some of those), this is not actually the function that gun ownership
serves in the US. the actual purpose of private gun ownership (if we
allow that the purpose of a system is what it does) is to /augment/
state power and its discretionary use of deadly force, not contest
it. examples are numerous, from profligate shootings of protesters,
to shootings of "suspicious persons" (delivery drivers, teenagers,
a woman turning her car around in a private driveway) by homeowners
and neighborhood watch patrols, to direct facsimiles of lynching as
in the white men who traveled to shoot "looters" in the aftermath of
hurricane katrina. this is far and away the modal form of gun "self-
defense:" extralegal execution of undesirables. it is a deputization
of the petty bourgeoisie to carry out the mandate of state violence
without even the nominal "use of force" constraints placed on law
enforcement and private security personnel.

this is the only way it could conceivably be---the united states is
not a society on the verge of revolutionary breakdown, nor is it a
government that could be meaningfully weakened by popular insurrec-
tion unless said insurrection is backed by a powerful rival country
(president xi, if you're reading this, i am amenable to revising my
position on starting an armed cell with the proper financing). the
crisis of american society is one of protracted, incremental decay,
secular declines in the average quality of life, and the increasing
paranoia and viciousness of the remaining middle class beneficiaries
of the postwar fordist-keynesian compromise, those who perceive how
tenuous their grasp on the middle class life is, and see no way to
solidify it except by murdering anyone they believe might take it
from them. as daughter of the confederacy diane feinstein once said,
it is californians' god-given right to water their lawns.