A lot of these laws stem from the premise that violence is itself bad, rather than violence must be justified and used appropriately.
As such even intending to use a legal item as a weapon and keeping it as such is identified as planning ahead of time to do something predatory and illegal.
Yet often times the same object if just conveniently nearby would be legal to use in justified self defense.
So what actually becomes illegal is being intelligent enough to plan ahead for self defense.
While at the same time you be required to be a member of a gun club for months or over a year to even have the ability to purchase a gun in many English Common Wealth nations.
So illegal to plan to protect yourself and illegal to have the ability to do it spur of the moment.
Many firearm storage requirements also limit storage to a state that makes it impractical to retrieve and load the firearm for immediate use in rapid unexpected self defense.
My understanding is that generally stored unloaded and separate from ammunition. Which means a location for a firearm and a location for ammunition both typically locked must be visited before manual dexterity involving loading the firearm while nervous about whatever was serious enough to justify immediate lethal force.
You almost have to be storing it in a manner not officially permitted to be lucky enough to use a gun for self defense.
This situation of course creates a general fake relationship with law enforcement because even saying the wrong intent for an item is a crime, not just doing something illegal with it. So citizens have to be sure to say the proper lie to avoid charges. That cricket bat, oh yes he is quite into practicing cricket, no it has nothing to do with the recent spat of burglaries in the neighborhood. No, nobody is planning any type of self defense with an unlawful weapon.
Knowing you have to lie to your local authorities, which is increasingly a more and more severe crime, in order to do something as basic as plan to defend yourself with mediocre equipment certainly puts the authorities at odds with any self reliant civilians and the general desire to submit to the rule of law.
But the government counters that by having one of the most widespread state based surveillance systems and as islands already has natural borders that resist widespread smuggling yet still cannot stop it.
