Choose the most likely threat

What’s the most pressing and urgent reason for maintaining an armed populace, if the statistical probability of responding to a threat is your main criteria?

a. Rising rates of violent crime
b. External armed invasion
c. Curbing game animal population growth through hunting
d. Democide, defined as death inflicted by one’s own government

The answer is "d".

Your chance of becoming a casualty at the hands of your own government is by far the most likely occurrence.

As this article makes abundantly clear, more people were killed by their own government during the 20th century than all the wars of that century combined.