But basically, people want guns to deal with all the other people who have guns. Most of them are dreaming, though, because they're not well enough trained to use them effectively.
When I was in Jersey City during Sandy, a gun would have been very handy: there were roving gangs of thugs roaming the blacked out streets breaking into homes and looting. Police response was vastly overloaded and the flood waters made mobility a problem. It’s prudent to be able to defend oneself in times of unrest. Just hoping for the “authorities” to do it is naïve. The US military has roughly a million troops, 250,000 cops and 380,000,000 million people spread out over a massive land area.
Realistically though, looting during a quarantine is pretty much the dumbest time to do so. The best scenario for looting is that one gets something valuable with minimal risk (eg. taking from an abandoned store or house).
Looting houses during a quarantine means that the looters would go into houses that are actively occupied, at a time where the occupants are nervous and potentially armed. Pretty much the worst case scenario.
Doesn't mean there aren't dumb criminals, but between looting houses for food or shoplifting food from stores, one is clearly less risky.
Looting a Twitter office who's sent all their employees home on the other hand.. pretty risk-free.
The problem is that to really be risk-free, you need everyone converging on the idea simultaneously, so that the police are overwhelmed -- this has happened with toilet paper.. whether it'll happen with looting corporate offices is to be seen. For now though, it's still pretty risky.
A bunch of people who misunderstand desperate people are down voting you. Downvoting because people are putting their head in the sand. We live in a society of "just in time" production and shipping. How much food do people have stored up?
> They actually know how to handle weapons and shoot you as soon as they see your weapon because they know how dangerous these things are.
Yes, that's exactly it. It's actually quite hard to train people to freely kill others. Most naive people think about using guns for intimidation. The first lesson in my weapons class (as I recall) was to never point a gun at anything you don't intend to shoot. Maybe the second lesson was to point and shoot as an uninterrupted process. Not any faster than you can do smoothly, but not any slower either.
Burroughs, who was quite the gun nut, also recommended that. He also advised to first take out assailants with shotguns.
There's a great anecdote in Hunter Thompson's book about hanging with Hell's Angels. Involving a guy who pointed a handgun at one of them, and got shot with it. Also a great sequence in some Seagal film with an Aikido reverse move with an assailant's shotgun. It's a riff on a sword move.
But basically, people want guns to deal with all the other people who have guns. Most of them are dreaming, though, because they're not well enough trained to use them effectively.