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Self defense being one of the major ones. But in the end, in many ways it all traces back to the Bill of Rights' protections for privacy and against government intrusion. It's why the UK government gets away with insane breaches of privacy against it's citizens, as well as creating a national security state that makes any application of that phrase to the US look almost laughable in comparison. The UK doesn't have a fourth amendment to guarantee that you're not being spied on by the police, no first amendment, no ninth amendment--and what they DO have is the Official Secrets Act, which basically says that anything the government says shouldn't be talked about is a crime to discuss.
Another source of the problem comes from the fact that historically, the UK (as well as much of Europe, but particularly the UK, being still based heavily on ideas of royalty) has had concerns about popular uprisings, spurred by communists, anarchists, foreign agents, whatever. This has created an underlying governmental belief system that is hostile towards, and distrustful of, the idea of an armed and independent citizenry, because those citizens could be a threat to the government. And if an armed citizenry is bad, then anyone exercising too much violence, even to defend themselves instead of waiting for the police, is to be viewed with suspicion as a dangerous criminal, rather than someone protecting their home. It's one of the reasons that the rate of "hot" burglaries, performed while the homeowners are actually there, is much higher in the UK than in the US. The burglars know that not only will the people not have any real weapons, but that they can't go too far in defending their home lest they risk being arrested themselves. It's a much lower risk crime.
There's one famous case where--I might have a couple of the details wrong--a group of three young men, teenagers possibly, climbed a metal fence to try and burglarize the home of an old man. One of the burglars slipped and cut his leg badly on the fence. The burglar then took the homeowner to court, and the court ruled that the homeowner had to pay the burglar for his medical bills and distress, because he was cut on the homeowner's fence, even though the young man was there in the commission of a crime.
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