The benefit to me is that I’ll extremely rarely be out-gunned when trying to protect my family. Some guys literally carry a rifle in a backpack wherever they go, because they think the benefit is worth the pain in. They see themselves as people ready to protect who willingly inconvenience themselves so they will also be able to protect. I wish there were tons of people like that (though not so much so that I think we should really promote it, they need to self-select because less stable people doing it could be net negative). Imagine if every robber knew that in all likelihood if they shot someone in a store, three guys would be posted up across the street waiting for them when they exited the door.

I think any method of use of force exists on a multidimensional continuum though. The characteristics of some makes the effect of them such that a mostly voluntary society might be justified in forcing members to not possess some. Nukes, engineered viruses, drones, machine guns, rifles, pistols, large physical size. They are all somewhere on it.

On that continuum, I think rifles play am important role in tyranny prevention because you can use them to harass a better-armed group from far enough away to probably escape.

Here’s an honestly held belief that I’m 100% willing to give up if false (and also am sneaking into the thread since it’s on handguns not rifles): nearly everyone who doesn’t have a handgun and at least occasionally carries it with them it hasn’t actually thought through what protecting themselves might look like. I think the default is to believe that we are completely safe and would never need one, and usually that’s true. Now maybe somebody really would rather “chance it”, but it seems like most are saying that while actually what they are doing is ignoring it and hoping for the best, where a more serious study would result in behavior change. One indicator of this for me is when people say Kyle Rittenhouse wasn’t defending himself when he shot those those guys. Ask them and they will always admit to not watching the video, usually because it’s too graphic for their personal limits. And fair, some people don’t want to develop familiarity with a scary topic. But I think then they would be responsible recognize that they should not vote about it either.