As a multi-gun owner and concealed carry permit holder/user, I'd also like to chime in.
<quote>However, today, the reasons given (by the gun lobby) seem to be heavily oriented toward individual protection. </quote>
There is a good reason for this. Not only is the U.S. not going to be invaded by a traditional army, as you said, but trying to make that argument just gives cannon-fodder for the 'other side'.
The self-defense case, however, is well grounded and supported by the facts. It is well documented that the incidence of homicide by firearm (around 10,000 per year) is orders of magnitude less than the number of crimes prevented by the use of firearms (2,500,000 is the number commonly cited from the FBI's crime statistics, and in some statistics, up to 200,000 women protect themselves from attackers each year by using firearms).
You can go to almost any gun-board and find lots of people sympathetic to that reasoning, not because they are looking for an excuse to protect their gun collecting and shooting sports hobby, but because they themselves were part of that 2.5m statistic.
Within the last few months, my fiance fended off a home intruder using a firearm I had left with her. She didn't need to fire a single shot, but the peace of mind it afforded her was unquestionable.
But it is a complicated issue as well. Both sides are fighting from fear. Most firearm owners LOVE firearms. Just like people love motorcycles or fine watches. They are carefully crafted and finely crafted pieces of engineering. There is a huge body of maths and physics behind internal, external, and terminal ballistics that everyman can share in. One can build their own custom AR-15 just like one might a gaming computer. One can compete with fellow enthusiasts in international shooting competitions and with organizations covering the whole gambit of firearms. To us, it is unthinkable that someone might want to take that away, and we are terrified of that. I'd feel the same about my motorcycles or my dog (which, by the way, one is about 50x more likely to be attacked by a dog than to be harmed by a firearm).
On the other hand, lots of people have an irrational fear of firearms built by ignorance and portrayal in the media as being exclusively the tools of death. Or maybe some even have a rational fear of firearms, but it is hard to find an argument against firearms that isn't grounded in fear.
Two sides anchored in fear leads to some really nasty fighting that probably isn't healthy for a sane debate.
[quote]it's also subtly encouraged the paranoid belief of the tyranny of our existing government. I think this is illogical, but many today here don't.[/quote]
To be fair, given the Snowden/Manning leaks, the LEO drone usage controversy, the police brutality thing... it is hard not to be paranoid.
My biggest fear is that our society is devolving into one like Aus or the U.K. have which pass permanent and pretty severe rights-restricting laws as knee-jerk reactions to whatever moral-panic of the minute ends up being, whether it be guns, vehicles, first amendment issues, or porn.
I was reading a bit about the NYS SAFE Act which was railroaded through the NYS legislature, at midnight, using a special loophole to go against the NYS constitution to prevent it from being debated, and signed into law within half an hour after passing.
The idea that a group of politicians from one city in a state could circumvent the democratic process whenever it tickles their fancy... that terrifies me. No matter what the issue is.