phishfood Wrote:Well, in Afghanistan, several different major military powers sent in troops in armored vehicles, backed by air support, and in some areas artillery.In Afghanistan, the US military is trying to quell an insurgency while keeping collateral damage to a minimum, not behaving like a brutal tyrant and unleashing its full might. A better model of the force disparity that I mentioned is the Syrian civil war, where the military uses pretty much every type of weapon in its arsenal, without regard for how much death and destruction is inflicted on the populace.
Despite vast technological, numerical, and weapons superiority, Afghan insurgent groups were able to continuously present a serious threat to all of the world's badass military power. Same thing happened to Russia in that same area 30 or so years prior.
However, neither of those conflicts are examples of private ownership of firearms preventing the government turning tyrannical.
phishfood Wrote:Our military's experience there and in Iraq really puts a dagger in the heart of your argument that an armed populace cannot hope to resist a government that wishes to subjugate it.Perhaps I wasn't clear. I did not mean that a populace armed only with rifles and pistols would be unable to mount significant resistance to an oppressive government. I meant that it might not provide enough deterrence value to keep the government from becoming tyrannical in the first place.
If the US government were to become a tyranny, I think it would likely happen with the unwitting assistance of the American people. Say, something along the line of the German model of the 1930s, when the population enthusiastically embraced a strong, charismatic leader who promised to make Germany great again...