> You can't really own a gun and practice castle doctrine. Your landlord has a key to your home and can lock you out at any time, or can go through your mail.

None of this is true in the US.

Castle doctrine applies to your domicile, and is not based on property ownership. If you have a lease, it is your home as far as CD is concerned. WRT gun restriction rules for rental properties, they vary by state, but in states where they can be prohibited, it would require a clause in the lease for a landlord to prohibit a tenant from having them (and these are nearly unheard of in practice because of enforceability issues). And that still would not affect their legality in a defensive shooting.

Landlords usually require written notice to enter the premises, in advance, and cannot "lock you out at any time" without going through an eviction process if you have a lease.

Landlords opening your mail is a federal crime. Mail can only be opened by the named recipient, it's not based on who owns the address of a building it's delivered to.

>Landlords usually require written notice to enter the premises, in advance, and cannot "lock you out at any time" without going through an eviction process if you have a lease.

Sure, in the same way that landlords aren't able to unfairly keep security deposits - they can and often do do it because it takes a lot of time and effort to attempt to get recompense after the fact, and the consequences even in that case are not significant enough to disincentivize them.

Apartments can ban pets, I don't see why they would have a problem banning weapons. If you want to be a gun owner, you basically have to live in a gun-friendly county of a gun-friendly state and only carry in the minority of gun-friendly private spaces that allow them.

It's like how we have 5th ammendment rights, but they don't apply 100 miles from the border, which just happens to include 90% of the population and the entire state of florida. We have rights that are de-facto illegal to practice due to the way they're implemented.

In the last apartment I was in, my mail went directly through my landlord and I was dependent on them to filter it by apartment room number.

Almost every landlord I've had has thrown out mail they've received after I've left. So if I order something and it ends up taking 2 months to get to my apartment, and I leave after the first month, I don't have access to that mail. They just throw it out.

The landlord, at the end of the day, holds all of the keys. They can change the locks. Even if it's illegal, are you going to go to court while homeless and without access to all of your possessions? My last apartment had an app that allowed them to remotely change the lock code.

My takeaway is that it is totally impractical to run a buisness out of an apartment. When you rent, you're a basically a peasant. You don't have a permanent mailing address, you don't have real security, you have no incentive to improve the property, and you are just paying out the ass for someone else's mortgage. For anything serious, it's better to live in an RV and get a P.O. box.