Normally this is the kind of conversation I'd avoid on the internet, but there are a couple of point I think are worth bringing up as we are TEST, and mostly decent if not sober people.
The overwhelming majority of combat encounters in the home happen in the dark, so savvy defense gurus practice “blind fighting” where they point their weapon without use of the sights. Many others put a flashlight on a gun, but this betrays your presence which can get you killed.
Yes, they do. Night is (mostly) when these parasites do their stalking.
No, they don't. As someone who has been to some of the top tier schools in the country, NONE of them teach anything resembling blind fighting. Mas Ayoob has long included methods that involve indexing via the handgun silhouette at very close distances, and most honest places incorporate contact and retention distance techniques. The presumption for ALL of them is that the requirements to make the decision to shoot have been met, and that you need your shot to change the opponent's course of action.
White light can certainly give away your position, but it is far, FAR more important to identify the thing out there in the dark before the decision loop can even be started. Thermal can help with this, but I don't want to be that homeowner 'who was lying in the dark, waiting to murder the defendant' when an unfriendly DA brings the criminal case. There are legal burdens on the defender here that simply can't be met by shooting in the dark, no matter what tool is used.
Some of my wallpaper: Gunsite, Thunder Ranch, Massad Ayoob Group, Dark Angel Medical, Lindell Retention. (P.S.A. - all of these are available to civilians who can pass a background check)
I don't really get it outside of the military.
In short, history. The folks who wrote our documents here had enough of the guy in charge of your part of the world at that time, and had an desire for 'the common man' to retain the ability to physically fight back when it got bad enough. It's a fairly well established thing with humanity that on the numbers, governments are the largest killer of their own people. If you doubt, just look around the planet today. It's not changed much.
The flip side of that right (any right!) is responsibility, and being human many of us ain't good at that. So the arguments go back and forth endlessly about what is 'best'.
So the laughable ease of getting your hands on some iron in the states (registered or not) has nothing to do with it?
Any legal transfer in the US requires a federal background check, so anyone trying to have a legitimate business has dozens of hoops to go through to be able to sell. Person to person has a few exceptions, such as within a family, or as an inheritance. Depends a lot on the local laws, as
@Shadow Reaper alludes to, but is largely illegal now.
'On the street' sure, if you want to dive down into those cultures it's possible to get them. I'm not going there, especially not at the risk of being in possession of stolen or crime-related property, or being turned in by an informant/sting operation.
Note, this is in EXTREME contrast to what our culture was a few decades ago, where there were MUCH lower barriers to acquiring firearms and much less of the type of crime that gets sensationalised today.