In the history of the United States, bullets have mostly if not solely been used for the protection of the lords, often by commoners either paid to do it and not caring, or convinced the issue was other commoners.
After all a common thread of US History is this LBJ quip:
> If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
US history really doesn't have enough time to see it. Not to mention the Bill of Rights enumerated the natural right to self defense to be protected, including being armed well enough to form a militia. ( Military oath calls out enemies foreign and domestic, doesn't say enemies who hold political office are immune )
Look at Japanese history however and you see 100s of years of disarmament.
I agree with your comment (it reminded me of the times the Pinkertons or the deputized sheriffs shot at strikers long ago), but I think that every citizen being armed would be a good guard for the society's freedom, and thus that it would be worth it.
More than guns (or in addition to guns), it is important that people know how their government works and make their support indispensable if a ruler wants to stay in power. In other words, increase the number of "keys" like this YouTuber explains
What I struggle with is how does one make the leap from being a democracy to being a democracy which protects the rights of minorities? This doesn't have to be a gender or race thing. For example, here in the US we clearly don't do enough to protect incarcerated people from {sexual, physical, mental} abuse (by staff or by other inmates).
That was part of the idea of the Constitution; the founding fathers knew that uninhibited democracies were a bad idea (even the Greeks experienced some bad things with mob rule) and specifically tried to create a democratic republic restrained by a written set of rules protecting citizens from arbitrary exercise of power by a majority to avoid some of the worst. They lived through quite a few things we are seeing now, but I think a large part of preventing it depends squarely on culture. Having a culture that fundamentally believes in justice and equality will stave off tyranny and oppression, but it doesn't matter what laws you have in a society that doesn't value those. When I took Chinese philosophy there was a philosopher (can't remember which one) who basically said that it is good men who make the laws, but laws without good men will not be enforced.
> specifically tried to create a democratic republic restrained by a written set of rules protecting citizens from arbitrary exercise of power by a majority to avoid some of the worst
They tried to create one with no power for anyone but white male landowners and with provisions that made changing that extremely difficult.
The US is a Constitutional Republic... why everyone continues to conflate this with democracy I do not understand. The states election process does not define the Federal govt.
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.
This isn't going to earn us any friends, but I agree with the contention, at least, that there is something to the theory that we'd be far less likely to suffer endless criminal war (as is the case now) on the part of the military-industrial complex, if we were indeed all armed of our own accord and thus responsible for our own defence at an individual level.
It does, at least, put a citizen on equal footing when it comes to understanding the responsibility of using a weapon, at all, to defend something or someone. There are many who say that responsibility is too heavy, or too hard, or should not be born by the individual .. but in this day and age there are too many well-armed warriors with the ability to destroy the very weak, and destroy they do. Daily.
One of the key means by which war-fighters get away with atrocity is when the weaker, non-armed civilians from which they must recruit and supply themselves, allow them to do so without oversight.
An armed citizenry defuses the source of military-industrial corruption: the secrecy by which the effects of war are kept from a weak-willed, easily manipulated, public.
If we knew what it was to fight a war, we'd be doing less of it. As it stands now though, the people of the nations of the western coalition are living in a putrid fantasy as to what their military are doing, in their name. And seem to be fine with it.
I wonder if it were so easily placed on the board, as it were, if we had a means of reigning in our military masters that was truly effective. In place of technological war-fighting might, it seems the only thing we have left is the light of truth on their secrets.
So, while the notion of 'arming all the citizens' is an extreme, there may be something less extreme in the idea of 'uncover all military-industrial secrets at all costs', which is .. after all .. kind of a similar basis by which one might defuse the complex.
A : Bullets don't care how much power or money they have.