With a topic this polarizing and complicated, I suspect that the truth(s) lie somewhere in between the extremes. As usual we have only these words with which to convey these sentiments, themselves crude tools that too often become imbued with strange values and meanings.
Does one need to have guns on a homestead?
My knee-jerk reaction is to say yes, but I think reality would say no. What makes it complicated is that the concept of "homestead" is relatively new in human history and is somewhat isolationist as compared to older, more collective dwelling situations. One *can* live within the homestead paradigm without guns, but one can also understand why guns would be reached for more in a homestead paradigm than in a more communal one.
Are there any other solutions?
As alluded to in the previous answer, communal living can reduce the need for guns since many problems might be solved by virtue of many hands, minds, and bodies present within that context. Without the community and without firearms, I just think one has to accept the additional vulnerability in their life, if indeed it could be documented to exist at all.
With regard to "humanely" killing stock, one has to be careful I feel about who's interests are being served by using a firearm. Certainly I would prefer to use a gun to put down stock before I or my wife would use other non-firearm methods, assuming as well that a pharmaceutical solution was not at hand. But this is because I'm (a) not trained/skilled to do it otherwise and (b) would
experience the emotional discomfort of killing something more "closely". The first could be rectified over time and generations by re-training those who desired to do so to be able to kill as efficiently as possible without a firearm, the second, a matter (just my opinion of course) of self-honesty about what one is doing. Both of these issues are 'solved' by use of a firearm, but not necessarily for "good" reasons.
The following may stray too far from the OP's intent with this thread and if deemed inappropriate, I completely understand its removal.
@Neil L.: (paraphrasing) "*Why* do Americans seem to feel so strongly about their guns?"
@Mark R.: "What does a responsible person do when the lives of others are at stake? He arms himself and is prepared to defend lives. "
Personally, I think this is a rather important topic for Permies consideration because the possible
roots of this might impact general concepts and manifestations of cooperation and conservation in a more
permie world. First, as a (Euro-ancestored) Yank, I'm willing to go along for the sake of argument that Americans do at least seem to cherish their gun ownership more than those in other countries. (Wife lived in Canada for a while and definitely noticed that although guns are quite present, the sentiment about them is reduced, at least in the Toronto area where she was living at the time.) I can't argue with the fact that I come into these discussions with a sense of gun ownership and availability almost as an entitlement....that's a testament to the family and culture in which I was raised and I realize it skirts a lot of history in securing that right.
As others have already indicated, part of this possibly-unique sentiment in the US can be attributed to the *conscious* (important!) historical memory of being "under the boot" and not wanting to be there again. Yet as Neil L. pointed out, the fervent nature of this desire seems stronger in the U.S. than in other countries with parallel histories of European immigration. My historical knowledge, even of my own country, remains poor at best and is laid open for criticism here. But I think an important question in this regard is, what was it that was uniquely American in the timing, population composition, and trajectory of its revolution that made it ultimately a competitor rather than a colluder with the British Commonwealth, even as cooperation between the two grew in later decades? And certainly one aspect here was encouragement by the early American elite/founders to embrace the right to bear arms, to use them in 'manifest destiny' of the North American continent to the extent possible, to exhibit 'rugged individualism' in the defense of their homesteads, to dovetail this sentiment with a domestic arms industry that would become unrivaled elsewhere, and in return to use those arms first in defense of the country and later in the defense of US international interests.
Second, while the homestead concept clearly is not unique to the U.S., I wonder to what extent the Commonwealth phenomenon in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to name a few possibly tempers this relationship to firearms a bit.....this isolationist "defense of the homestead" that is such a powerful American vision. I'm neither arguing that sectors of the U.S. were not/never communal nor that some sentiment of rugged individualism was lacking in Commonwealth countries, but rather that a national sentiment...a 'meme'....took hold early on in the U.S. with the blessings of those writing the laws and collecting the taxes.
A final third and less frequently probed factor weighing in on this US gun issue may relate to the *subconscious* (important!) psychology of fear and pain, specifically rooted in persecution/ostracism and fundamentally grounded in powerlessness. Because the early, founding waves of immigrants into the U.S. had both a recent and far reaching generational historical experience with being under the boot or looking down the barrel of a gun and often *needing* to leave their homeland and families, although sometimes *wanting* to leave them as well due to socially-unacceptable developments of the time and culture....divorce, illegitimate pregnancy, unresolvable family/communal conflicts, etc.. Digging a bit deeper as Michael Haneke suggested in his film "Das Weisse Band", and psychological observation has confirmed time and again, the persecuted parent tends (although not unfailingly) to take this frustration out on their powerless children. (This in turn tends to develop later into either repressed hostility or occasionally expressed violent outbursts of power and violence.) These early immigrants generally arrived in America under the servitude of persons or companies, but eventually myriad forces co-mingled leading to revolution. In what might be viewed as a combination of "Stockholm Syndrome" and Freud's "Compulsion to Repeat", the traumatized, powerless mind...in this present musing, the "collective mind" of the subjugated immigrant.... actually embraced the antics of the aggressor and wedded itself to culturally/state-sanctioned sources of power. Pertinent to initial US colonization and subsequent eventual expansionism, this power was realized through gun ownership, frequently manifest in a larger cache than realistically needed. In the ultimate mimicry of the Imperial aggressor, the US eventually emerges to (for a time) out-compete other nations for global resources and wealth by wielding a formidable military stick, a motivation for which was born largely out of unrecognized, and domestically-recurring, feelings of powerlessness.
"The only society more fearful than one run by children, as in Golding's 'Lord of the Flies', might be one run by childish adults"--Paul Shepard, "Nature and Madness".
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