@stabcutdrink Well I suggest you to read my answer to ShadowDragon above, as I don't want to paraphrase myself. But the whole point is that sure for the individual it is better to be alive rather than dead, but on an utilitarian PoV it doesn't really matter that the victim of the burglary or the agressor dies as they both carry the same utilitarian value.
Also, as every advocate of self-defense you are just envisioning the best case scenario which is dissuasion, but I don't think it always works that way. For example, let's assume that criminality is systemic and not due to some random nutjobs (which seem to be the case). In that case, crimes are bound to happen even if you are arming the victims. What's going to happen then is that as the victims get more and more dangerous to the criminals, those criminals are going to arm themselves more and more and you're going to end up with more violence than previously (so more death in total, in particular, I suspect the victim death toll wouldn't increase that much, but the offender death toll would increase tremendously). The number of crimes wouldn't increase, but each and every one of them is bound to be more violent because each party expect the other to be more violent and, as such, feel more entitled to use lethal force.
To be clear, until you can prove that such an inverse correlation between crime rate and posession of guns exist, it feels that your whole case is kinda empty (sure it works on a perfect theoritical case, but I'm not so sure in practice). Sadly, I looked that up and didn't find much about it. Most people focus on gun ownership vs violent crime rate correlations (which seem to be quite unconclusive btw) but not many people seem interested in proving that gun ownership is a deterrent to crime (which means people don't really think about the issue rationaly as this is the main argument of pro-gun stance).
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@stabcutdrink Well I suggest you to read my answer to ShadowDragon above, as I don't want to paraphrase myself. But the whole point is that sure for the individual it is better to be alive rather than dead, but on an utilitarian PoV it doesn't really matter that the victim of the burglary or the agressor dies as they both carry the same utilitarian value.
Also, as every advocate of self-defense you are just envisioning the best case scenario which is dissuasion, but I don't think it always works that way. For example, let's assume that criminality is systemic and not due to some random nutjobs (which seem to be the case). In that case, crimes are bound to happen even if you are arming the victims. What's going to happen then is that as the victims get more and more dangerous to the criminals, those criminals are going to arm themselves more and more and you're going to end up with more violence than previously (so more death in total, in particular, I suspect the victim death toll wouldn't increase that much, but the offender death toll would increase tremendously). The number of crimes wouldn't increase, but each and every one of them is bound to be more violent because each party expect the other to be more violent and, as such, feel more entitled to use lethal force.
To be clear, until you can prove that such an inverse correlation between crime rate and posession of guns exist, it feels that your whole case is kinda empty (sure it works on a perfect theoritical case, but I'm not so sure in practice). Sadly, I looked that up and didn't find much about it. Most people focus on gun ownership vs violent crime rate correlations (which seem to be quite unconclusive btw) but not many people seem interested in proving that gun ownership is a deterrent to crime (which means people don't really think about the issue rationaly as this is the main argument of pro-gun stance).