Surely the big lesson from the middle East is that guns can deliver violent chaos or despotic centralism but not peaceful stability?
Guns, in and of themselves, don't deliver anything. They're tools, that's it. Whether or not the people of the Middle Eastern countries like Afghanistan find peaceful stability or not depends on a whole laundry list of variables.
First and last lesson: never partition countries out of disparate ethnic/religious/sectarian groups who don't have some sort of larger overriding loyalty holding them together.
Guns, in and of themselves, don't deliver anything. They're tools, that's it. Whether or not the people of the Middle Eastern countries like Afghanistan find peaceful stability or not depends on a whole laundry list of variables.