Consider the following hypothetical: You're a female rape victim. The rapist broke into your house and performed said act. 6 months pass, and you decide to buy

Consider the following hypothetical: You're a female rape victim. The rapist broke into your house and performed said act. 6 months pass, and you decide to buy a gun (a glock, say) and take self-defense classes which include weapons training. You now stash the gun under your pillow at night, and you live alone. Would effective self-defense (ostensibly, including the likelihood of killing a potential perpetrator) be evil? I don't see how you get out of this puzzle. The only thing I can think of is something like St. Augustine's argument that it can be sinful to do something, but still be a morally right act (or morally right thing to do). One of his points is that this is one of the perplexing aspects of the human condition. But if we follow Augustine down this path, then we don't really end up with a conclusion that you wanted to drive at. You want to say putting resources behind a nation-state defending itself is evil, and is evil tout court. Augustine's argumentative path won't get you there. Now, you could say individual self-defense is not the same as nation-state self-defense. That's fair. But, let's now walk our way down this path a bit. Is there a relevant and substantive difference between individual self-defense and the self-defense of a village of 50 native american indians soon to be snuffed out by Custer? How about 1,000? At what point do we say too many people in the collective ('nation-state') makes effective self-defense evil, in general.