The Need to Use a Gun for Home Defense is a Failure of Technology

The reality, of course, is that if you are in [a home defense situation] needing to make that split-second decision, you messed up a long time ago. Home defense advice focuses on putting you into a position where you have many leisurely minutes to make that decision, or to prevent yourself from needing to make it at all by deterring intruders. Concentric rings of security, making your home a hard target, door hardware that makes it take a few minutes to kick your door in, etc. And all of that is great. The vast majority of home defense situations don’t involve a successful break-in, let alone gunfire.

What if all of that fails? The final option is a gun. But think about what that means: if somebody does successfully break into your house, with current technology the best option is, “You get five seconds to make the most consequential decision of your entire life.”

There are four problems with shooting somebody:

1. 1. The moral weight of taking a life
   2. The risk of shooting the wrong person (mistaken identity and/or hitting bystanders)
   3. The physical danger that the intruder will shoot back or otherwise hurt you
   4. The potential for criminal or civil litigation afterwards

Guns are pretty bad on all four. In the extreme case where your life is at risk, it’s of course better to eat those problems than to be dead. And there will always be such cases, so guns will always be the final backstop. But over time, technology can give you more options to use before going to that final backstop. Even after someone has broken into your home, “how do you effectively stop them with zero moral/physical/legal risk to yourself?” is just a technology problem.

— Open Source Defense in Home Defense is an Unsolved Problem