I suppose illusions can be helpful. But the more illusions depart from reality, the more cognitive dissonance they generate, which means the person under the spell is stressed out trying to protect the friendly illusion even as it obviously conflicts with reality. You don't need the illusion of safety in most developed countries, because they have strict gun laws and few guns lying around. The US is the exception, so Americans may have to pretend that having hundreds of millions of privately-owned guns is a good thing because they can somehow still be used to defeat a tyrannical government.