Are you Safer Armed?

The actual answer is that 99.9% of the time you are physically less safe with a weapon of any kind than if you were unarmed. You might feel psychologically safer but this type of feeling safer is not accurate. For example, if you "Open Carry" a weapon there is a high chance that a paranoid unstable person will grab that weapon and shoot you with it. So just doing an "open carry" is extremely dangerous even if you are completely safe carrying that weapon. Just ask any police officer who "open carries" of how many policemen are shot by criminals grabbing police officers guns from them.

If you want to be safe don't live in an area where you feel you need to carry a weapon. And if you choose a home weapon for protection the most useful is something like a baseball bat. Many people I have known that don't allow firearms in their houses still keep a baseball bat in a useful location for emergencies against an intruder or problem wild or domesticated unruly animal.

Also, if you are under 5 foot 6 inches in the U.S. a good home weapon might be a pistol or shotgun. If you are over 5 foot 6 inches then a baseball bat becomes much more useful. However, because average height varies in every society on earth you might need to come up with a useful borderline height for your society.

If you live in suburbia or in a city none of this might make sense to you. However, my family for hundreds of years trained all the boys and most girls to use rifles and pistols by the time they were 4 to 8 years old. So everyone was an expert shot with a rifle even at 100 yards by the time they were 9 or 10 including me. My grandfather was a hunter and at one time had 20 hound dogs during the early 1900s and hunted bear, elk, deer,  and a variety of other things from about 1900 through the 1930s when he gave up his dogs during World War II.(My wife says that I should say musket ball rifles and musket ball pistols were the main explosive weapons before the 1830s or so. Multiple shot carbines and automatic rifles and 6-shot revolvers and automatic pistols didn't get invented and go into wide usage until the middle to late 1800s).

Being proficient for hundreds of years with all hunting weapons was just as important as being able to ride a horse or saddle it or hitch up a buckboard or carriage. And then to  later generations, driving a car and maintaining it or riding a motorcycle or flying a plane took the places of or were in addition to horses, buckboards, or carriages. Though many people these days never fire a weapon or even have shot a weapon these days or even have seen a weapon up close except on the hip of a police officer, this didn't even begin to become true until after the Viet Nam War. Before the end of the Viet Nam War it was very common for boys to have toy guns. But after the Viet Nam War too many children were shot by police for brandishing look alike toy guns and at this point toy guns became out of fashion.

For example, in my own life I have considered getting a Kalashnikov AK-47 that would be legal to have in California. However, even though the efficiency of this particular weapon and the fact that you could literally bathe it in mud or sand and still have the thing work the way it is designed without jamming. And the fact that even if you don't clean the barrel that it still tends to fire and not eventually explode the barrel from non-cleaning like some rifles and pistols might I found interesting as well. However, in the end I decided not to buy a Kalashnikov because I simply would never use it. And since my wife and daughter would just be uncomfortable with it in the house and since I live in the safest place I have ever lived in my life I don't really see the need for it now or in the future.

In the end all weapons are only a psychological tool 99.9% or more of the time. And they are a danger to everyone in your household just having them all of the time. So unless you are a collector and will put them in glass cases throughout your house and never buy any ammunition for them they tend to be a threat to everyone in your home, especially if you have children. The other problem that exists with any weapon or any tool. And this is that there is a tendency to want to use that tool and here lies the danger with any weapon. What are you or your children or your neighbors children going to do with this tool that they might want to see or use?