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While I probably have the same terminal values as you do here, this feels like wishcasting.
If the 2nd Amendment were to be cast aside, we wouldn't get a newer, better 2nd Amendment. We'd get a wholesale ban on guns like they have in the UK, Australia, or Japan.
To put it another way... we should be very careful about casting aside long-established norms. Because when we do, we will not end up at some ideal, better place. We will end up wherever the regime wants to take us. There is no world in which you get to have a gun but the people you dislike do not.
Just to point out the UK does not have a wholesale ban on guns. A shotgun license is pretty straightforward to get. Rifles slightly less so. Handguns are generally banned except perhaps ironically back home in Northern Ireland.
Do you believe that the UK has a functional right to self-defense?
Yes indeed. Though largely you can't want a gun for those purposes. Again excepting Northern Ireland where you can get a firearms license for that reason alone.
Edit: Though this has nothing to do with the correction that the UK does not have a wholesale ban on guns. The rest of jeroboams post may or may not be true, but that particular statement is straightforwardly incorrect.
I'd have to look up how things are in the UK, but Europe is pretty staunchly against self defense, and I haven't heard anything that would indicate the UK is any different.
IIRC there are situations where self-defence is allowed, but as @FCfromSSC implied there's no functional right to self-defence; if you have a gun to hand when someone goes active shooter, I think you're allowed to return fire... but you 99.99% of the time don't have a gun to hand if you're following the law, because you're not allowed to take a gun (or a knife or armour) with you for the purposes of self-defence, which makes the point moot.
Forget guns, a lot of Europe has this idea of "proportional force" which requires you to make constant legal evaluations as you're fighting for your life, resulting in cases like this where people watch helplessly as an attacker scales a ladder to assault them in their own home (there's a more disturbing video version of this somewhere that I can't find now, because all searches suck now).
Is that because of the legal framework or because most modern people are very unfamiliar with violence and hesitant to engage in it? I heavily suspect the victim there was not worrying about the law.
My experience having had a bit of a rough and tumble upbringing is that a lot of middle class people whether in the UK or US shy away from violence even in self-defence, not because of legal worries, but because they have never really had to engage in it.
I'd default to believing that these things reinforce one another. If a legal framework demands constant checks when physically defending oneself, then a culture of just shying away from violence is a reasonable response. And if there's a culture of just shying away from violence, then structuring the law to punish the few outliers who choose not to disengage, since engaging causes more direct, immediate harm is a reasonable act. Perhaps one was the chicken and the other the egg, or perhaps both were birthed by some 3rd common factor, but ultimately, those don't matter; if there's a self-reinforcing cycle, then every part of the cycle is caused by every other part.
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