Bewolf

This discussion is odd. The premise out there is the following. If the government all of a sudden becomes evil, real men have guns to fight it.

Two problems with that.

1. The obvious one. The military laughs about private guns. They even laugh about big private guns. Why? Apart from the equipment question (tanks, jets, missles etc vs. your average Joe Desert Eagle, M16 etc), it also is an organisation matter.

Group A, hooray rednecks, trained in hunting and gunmeets. Group B, the US miliatary, veterans from wars all over the place, lots of expirience with all kinda weapons and most important, using squad tatics. Who is gonna win?

2. The not so obvious but even more important problem. No Police state and no dictatorship can survive without the majority of the population standing behind it. If the population decides to rebel on a nationwide margin, no country has the power and even more so, the legitimicy to oppose that for any given time. There are countless examples of this throughout history. Weapons do not help this cause at al unless it is a foreign invader.

This means, if a police state ever came to power in the US, you bet most civilians would run along with it. That the US population was willing to ignore human rights and accept camps, the patriot act and similiar actions completly going against the ideals of democracy and human rights show how such a state could be achieved. In fact, lawwise the US already have all the instruments in place should it ever find a president that sees a reason to stay in office instead of a reelection. Terror regimes are recogized as such only a long time afterwards. It's creeping up on ppl, it 's not happening just so from one day to the other. Bush, from all the US presidents, certainly came closest to the cliches in this regard, even though he vertainly was not a dictator at all. Still, and interestingly enough, it's the gun crowds following him. Which could lead to the conclusion that privately held weapons in the US were rather be used to support terror regimes instead of stopping them in the name of patriotism. That's nothing more then a thought experiment, though.

This way or another, I doubt any future war against opression can be won with guns at all. Technology has advances to a degree it's mostly electronic and internet warfare important here. These who win the propaganda war and claim the interpretion of pictures and messages for themselves usually also win the war.