The "want to be" gun confiscators would have a daunting job ahead of them

[montana]

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..

Once again you are being disingenuous Stan. Syria is a proxy war between the US and Russia where neither of the host players live. If every weapon in the arsenal were used, all nations would be a dead radioactive waste land. Even tyrant and patriot alike wish to survive. John Adams opinion is proving to be prophetic.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. John Adams
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/john_adams_391045

However, neither of those conflicts are examples of private ownership of firearms preventing the government turning tyrannical..

Nobody can claim victory in those conflicts either and so the battles continue. Having a military hasn't prevent wars between nations either so what is your point ? Yet nations continue to fund military's as a means to discourage other nations from attaching them. The point of military's and The 2nd Amend. is to deter, not necessarily prevent. https://www.skylighters.org/quotations/quots6.html

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..

So you are admitting an armed population possibly could deter governments from becoming tyrannical?

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...

What "want to be leader" didn't claim to make the nation better if they were trying to gain power? Charismatic leader is subjective to who is listening. Obama would be a perfect example of charismatic leader to the ill informed. I never saw it,"scratching my head in confusion" but to many he was like a new messiah with zero reasoning to back it. Yea, even writing that made me a little queasy lol.