So the big hubub in my neighborhood is that there was a house broken into last week while the resident was home. She awoke to hear her dog barking, looked out the window, and saw someone running away from her house. This was at 7:00AM. She called the cops, and per her estimate, it took 2 hours for them to respond.
The general issue has to do with staffing - we do not live in a city, and rely on the county sherrifs office for law enforcement. The county is 555 square miles, and we have only a handful of officers on patrol. Our particular neck of the woods is a tiny sliver, but has the highest population density and is fairly close to the city of Charlotte. We have roughly one officer per 20k residents at any given time.
If that one officer has to book someone, it's a 15-20 minute drive to the sherrif's office/jail, and he has to be there for a couple of hours doing the booking. If some emergency were to come up, his response time would definitely be limited.
Right next to our development is "family land", where the land owner has owned that parcel for generations. He rents his land out as he sees fit, including migrant workers, meth-heads, and Hells Angels (no schtick, there have been a number of raids there recently, Hells Angels local HQ is just down the road from us). These folks do not like our development which is fairly new - the builder chopped down some woods and brought "progress" to their back yards.
The point of all this is that residents of our community cannot depend on Law Enforcement for security. What would you anti-gun folks have residents of my community do?
We are, of course, causing a big stink with the local gov't, but as you all know, gov't moves slowly. "we'll consider adding more manpower for the Sherrifs office at the next budget meeting in July, but frankly we don't have the money as it is" isn't a very re-assuring response.