I have a baseball bat in my house and it's not there to hit balls but to hit anyone who attempts to come into my home without my permission. I doubt I'll ever need to use it, but there you go, it's one single purpose is to "maim or kill", which in reality is actually protection and I'd be happy with fear itself being the deciding factor.
I don't come down on either side on gun control, they're mostly banned here in the UK and that's just how it is. However, I think you'll find most people actually consider protection is a legitimate reason to have a weapon, so you shouldn't so easily write it off.
At least it used to be the case that many school children played rounders, and you typically use a baseball bat for that. (I don't remember what you call the bat you use for rounders - probably just "bat", as it's usually obvious from context you're not talking about cricket or golf.)
Perhaps most UK people posting here don't expect Americans to have heard of this game.
You're doubtless right that most are probably purchased for hitting people in the face, perhaps without necessarily even waiting for them to break in to one's house first.
You are correct, but it's a matter of degree. It's much, much easier to maim or kill with a gun than with a baseball bat and that's why I'm glad no one has guns in the UK. If someone comes at me with a baseball bat I can run away. If someone comes at me with a gun, I'm dead.
Not to belittle your point, but you're not necessarily dead if someone comes at you with a gun. Many factors dictate if the shooting will be fatal. For example, in far too many cases police officers and others defending themselves have had to fire multiple shots to disable or kill an attacker. And in some cases have failed. So you might not be dead.
With that said, people do have guns in the UK, just not law abiding people. Gun crime is apparently up 89% the UK since the ban as well, so there are guns in the UK:
1) you may survive an attack with a firearm, according to the OP it appears a majority of gunshot victims do (30k shot vs 8k killed in the US)
2) there are guns in the UK, and more gun crime since the ban went into effect. Infer from that what you will.
I read somewhere about a study which suggested that some ridiculous high number of gun uses (90+% if memory serves) were resolved without discharging the gun. The thing is, these situations were rarely, if ever, reported (and if they were, it's often up to speculation if the situations would actually have led to a crime), leading to a systematic difficulty in accurately deciding the effectiveness of guns in crime prevention.
The point is, if someone pulls a gun, and you run away, they have very likely achieved their goal, and are unlikely to discharge the gun.
Bingo, and it's many studies; amusingly, the first was done with data collected by gun grabbers, and it had lower numbers since it didn't ask if the respondent had used a gun in self-defense more than once during the year.
Current numbers put self-defense gun uses at something like 2.25 million per year, with indeed way over 90% never involving a gun being discharged.
There's also a systematic difficulty in the other direction, I'm pretty sure most criminal uses of guns also don't involve it being discharged. And some fraction of those don't get reported to the police or then reported accurately, you'd need to start with the national crime survey data.
It's already been said, but if a woman or elderly person wanted to attack me with a stick, I'm pretty confident I could disarm them. If it were a gun, I would run. This is a great equaliser and in the context of me being a potential threat by trespassing into their property, I have no arguments with people owning and using a gun.
Where things get murky is those defending themselves aren't always resonable. There are countless other cases where the "victim" steps over bounds within the UK, and presumably elsewhere, and whilst I don't really support protecting criminals, I don't entirely the idea that you can murder someone for stepping on your lawn, stealing from you, or any other reason besides you feeling that you or others are going to come into direct harm.
Personally I think the US has some very strange rules with regards to guns, standing your ground and protecting your property, but we are obviously largely divided on what constitutes resonable force, which is why I don't exactly endorse guns ownership.
Anecdotally, from what I've heard and what I observed in the Missouri CCW class I took, the demographics of concealed carry are strongly biased to the older, mostly middle-aged and older.
For exactly the reason you point out. Grandma and grandpa have gotten too old to even think of holding their own in hand to hand combat, but a very large fraction can safely use handguns. And, anecdotally, in my CCW class it was mentioned they had only failed two people, one guy who couldn't observe Rule 2 (was pointing his handgun everywhere, can't remember if he was really old), and one old lady who wasn't strong enough to rack the slide of Glock (unfortunately she gave up at that point instead of finding a solution that was within her physical capabilities).
I don't come down on either side on gun control, they're mostly banned here in the UK and that's just how it is. However, I think you'll find most people actually consider protection is a legitimate reason to have a weapon, so you shouldn't so easily write it off.