An excellent article and I sympathize with your struggle. As a European I have always found the US attitude to gun ownership simply insane and I loathe guns. That said, when I lived in the USA I acquired the necessary small arms because when you live in a madhouse it is sometimes necessary to combat the inmates. I recognized that in 99% of cases, owning a gun was useless. Random shooters don’t call you up and forewarn you; the first thing you know is the aftershock of the bullet and then the searing pain. Guns aren’t magical talismen and no amount of stupid NRA propaganda will change that fact. But for that 1% of time, one would feel foolish to be defenseless.
Unfortunately Hollywood has convinced the average US citizen that guns are indeed magical. Bad guy rounds routinely go stray while good guy rounds miraculously hit their intended target. There are no casualties from good guy rounds going wild nor ricochets that kill or maim just as badly as rounds on target.
In reality having a tool is merely step one of a long process. I was fortunate many years ago to have been trained by the best of the best, but shooting is a skill that rapidly deteriorates. Therefore regular practice under real-world conditions is essential to turn the inert tool into a useful tool. An outdoor unsupervised range where you can draw, turn, roll, fall, slide, and engage multiple moving targets is ideal. Dummy rounds in every magazine will encourage automatic reflex stoppage drills (amateurs train to hit the target, professionals train to recover instantly from things going wrong). Have someone push you, punch you, ideally even Taser you while you try to concentrate on engaging targets. In real life your adrenaline will be sky-high, your motor skills will deteriorate, and your brain will shut down so that you see only the “tunnel” of the obvious aggressor, missing lots of other vital information in consequence. You need to mimic this in order to learn how to function when it’s happening for real.
Somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 rounds per weapon per year is the minimum necessary to achieve basic proficiency and the muscle memory that could, if you’re lucky, make the difference between living and dying in a real-world encounter.
A gun on its own, outside of a Hollywood script, is just a lump of alloy and polymer.
