Ed Ames
Member
How can what you may need to defend your self, if you do, have anything whatsoever with the assessment of likelihood of occurrence as assessed before the fact?
It isn’t a single likelihood or a single risk. It’s a single tool.
Each risk has a likelihood of occurrence, and the tool has different likelihoods of success for each risk.
Let’s shift this away from firearms for a moment and consider fires. In our day to day lives we face risk of fire from multiple sources, in multiple environments, with multiple potential outcomes. Many of the fire risks we’re exposed to are completely beyond the capabilities of any fire extinguisher we’re likely to buy at a hardware store and keep in our homes. Even within a particular type of fire risk, a given fire extinguisher has only the potential to put out a particular fire, if caught in specific circumstances.
The fact that the biggest fire extinguisher you could physically lift cannot put out a fully engaged house fire doesn’t mean a fire extinguisher isn’t worth owning. Even the smallest fire extinguisher....even a wet rag...gives a person a chance to keep their house from burning down. What is the optimal size (and type) of fire extinguisher? That depends.
Same with carry guns. A given gun/shooter combination is going to have a range of likelihoods of success depending on the specific risk scenario. There will always be scenarios where the likelihood of success is basically zero. There will always be scenarios where the likelihood of success is above zero. A different gun may increase the number of scenarios where the chances of success are above zero, but (just like a wet rag) even a BB gun has some scenarios where they deliver non-zero likelihoods.
The goal is to choose a tool that makes as many of the scenarios you are likely to encounter as possible non-zero. Picking a tool based on scenarios you’ll never actually encounter (dinosaur attacks or whatever) is obviously silly, but how about scenarios you are vanishingly unlikely to encounter?