Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Have to laugh at all the Americans saying this is crazy or nonsensical when it's legal to carry guns in much of your country :-D Not making the connection here, care to elaborate?
The TV license is an admittedly odd way of funding a state broadcaster, but it works well enough that nobody has bothered to change it. One mass shooting on the scale of El Paso was enough to prompt a systematic overhaul of British firearms legislation; we just can't understand how so many American citizens can comfortably reconcile your extraordinarily high rate of gun violence with your exceptionally lax gun regula…
I think the concept of the license is rather alien to people in countries where all civic amenities are subject to the whims of democracy and the government. This is very much not true of many things in the UK (the BBC, the Army, numerous universities and schools, guilds and societies) which would formally exist even if the government were to disappear.
I know you probably know all this, so this is really for everyone else's benefit.. but the BBC's entire basis is defined by a Royal Charter which is independent of politics. If the government of the day (or, say, a Trump-esque character) hates the BBC, they can't suddenly defund or destroy it. This is why we do not pay for it in a tax (which the government could adjust) but via a license defined by Royal Charter.
I think the British way of having government merely being one more institution amongst many (rather than the institution) is a rather powerful advantage.