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That's kinda my thoughts on the matter. I have a couple rifles and shot guns that are mostly just family heirlooms, and one rifle that's explicitly for protection.

Unfortunately i live in one of the most dangerous states in the south, and I'm a minority married to a white woman. When all the racist people in the state were getting all crazy during the trump years, I decided having a rifle that wasn't an antique was probably a good idea.

But it's pretty much explicitly for protecting my family and friends from the potential of eventual racial violence. I would actually feel kinda bad for anyone who actually tried to rob my house, there's just nothing to really steal. Definitely nothing worth dying or killing for. Hell I'd probably make a pretty good return on the insurance claim.

the end goal of owning a gun is murder.

Well, I mean, depending on how you define murder. The end goal of a gun might also be hunting (which might be murder depending on your definition of like, whitetail deer being something worth preserving), sport shooting, or vintage collecting/odd engineering collecting. The main alternative use case mostly being hunting, I would say, nine times out of ten, which is still shadowed overwhelmingly be people who are super fear-mongered about randomly getting shot. You can definitely still kill someone with, say, a hunting rifle, a .22lr sport pistol with a barrel weight and a custom grip and a 1000 dollar reflex sight, or a vintage civil war musket, right, but I wouldn't say that any of those things are really like, carried or owned with the end goal of killing someone.

I'd also bring up, as an intellectual point, more than anything else, since this really doesn't tend to be a successful tactic in modern society, that someone can take all your stuff, right, but it might also be a very valuable tactic to just straight up kidnap you. There's human trafficking, but then there's also, them trying to extort your immediate family. You would see this more with nobles in the middle ages, though, I don't think such a thing is really common enough nowadays to be worried about, basically at all, for the same reasons that it's kind of absurd to expect someone to randomly break in to your house and steal all your shit while you're still there. Most people looking to rob someone would much rather do so while nobody's home, for pretty obvious reasons. If you were to kidnap someone, you'd probably want to go for the highest ROI possible and just go for like, a super rich trust fund kid, or something, which isn't gonna be the vast majority of people. I think this tends to be the case more often in other countries.

The fucked up part to me is that we have convinced basically the majority of gun owners, who might otherwise be normal, non-gun-owning people in a different society, that they should own guns on the basis of self-defense, which is kind of mostly insane flat out. It's not a belief that's based in reality for the vast majority of gun owners, it's an idea that's been marketed to them as a result of a politically funded kind of cottage industry that funds weapons manufacturing in america and abroad.

At the same time, as we've seen in this post, this also results in a lot of crazy people with guns, which begets more people with guns in response. A literal arms race, much like we see now with car sizes, where people are convinced they must buy bigger to protect themselves. I can't really, in good conscience, say that, for example, a black trans woman, that will probably on average live to be like, 30, mostly as a result of hate crimes, shouldn't own a gun for self-defense. They might not want to own a gun for other reasons, right, like mental health, or not having the ability to really secure it or use it effectively, but I can't really disagree with them on the basis that they would want to own one for self-defense. I would politically advocate for this not to be the reality in which we have to live, but I can still acknowledge the reality of these sorts, honestly not super uncommon edge cases, while I work against it.

It's sort of the same frustration I encounter when someone inevitably brings up how, oh, well, they would otherwise take a bike, or have a small shitbox, right, but their kids, really, it's to protect the children. Really, they live way out in the boonies, and they have 7 children, so of course they need an escalade capable of towing 5 horses. I can't really argue against that, you know? Most people don't give a shit about like, what intellectually scales for society at large, they just give a shit about what's through their own myopic worldview, and I can't exactly blame people for acting in their own self-interest, even if it ends up being kind of shittier for society at large, or if it ends up just playing into a kind of broader cycle most people aren't privy too.