Since you own a gun...

[Urbane Guerrilla]

BTW - what else is a handgun used for, besides killing someone? Big game hunting? Pu-leeze.

Jay-zus, Spexx. You call yourself a modern, with-it man? Uh uh -- your thinking is so totally last century as to make you a complete square -- maybe a tesseract.

Handgun hunting even has its own particular season, Spexx. (Kid, if you're going to debate guns with gun people, you need to know all about guns!) Here is a short and not at all comprehensive list of hunting handguns, both single shot and repeaters:

Smith & Wesson Model 29, .44 magnum; Thompson-Center Contender and Encore, any caliber you want up to minor elephant gun cartridges like .375 H&H, single shot; Casull .454, a magnum that dwarfs the .44 mag, and a 5-shot revolver you can shoot bears with; .460, .475, and .480 Linebaugh -- mainly, like the Casull, put in conversions of large Ruger revolver frames. Lots of revolver makers make a .357, which was the first magnum cartridge Elmer Keith invented before he came up with the .44 mag -- specifically to hunt with.

With a hunting handgun, you're not keeping one hand involved with toting seven or eight pounds of rifle while you make your way through or across the rough country, but instead wearing three or four pounds of smaller more convenient pistol and pistol scope, often as not. (Elmer Keith did it with iron sights and shot moose three hundred yards off with his .357. Ate 'em, too. Then he did it better with a bigger cartridge.)

Handgun hunting seasons approximate the special muzzleloader seasons, and for about the same reason -- each has its particular demands (like no available follow-up shot) and imposes limits upon the gun-toting hunter.

But staying alive and unhurt is my primary goal.

Then arm yourself and become skilled not only at putting shots inside the ten-ring, but in what tactics you will use to defend your dwelling -- the best way, proven in study after study of which studies you know nothing, nothing at all, is to have greater force available to you than to the invader. Your chances of "doing my best to kill you" if you didn't bring a gun to the gunfight are laughably small: "...a grasshopper may fight a lawnmower; his courage is undoubtable, but not his judgement" or something like that. Heinlein again -- his thinking, along with Jeff Cooper's, informs a lot of my thinking on this and related subjects.