[Joker_vD]

"Do not ever give up your guns", har-har. In the guerilla stage of the Second Chechen War one of the ways to deal with the insurgents who would barricade in a building was to drive a T-72 to it and fire a couple of HE shells at it. The house would fold in like, well, a house of cards; I believe there even used to be recorded footage on YT. I imagine a single fragmentation shell would be enough for an average American house. My point is, in the modern days having small firearms is not really going to help you against a government who would be willing to use its military on its own territory; you'd need automatic weapons and artillery at the very least, and a lot of foreign funding and training as well. Even then...

[kortilla]

This assumes the military just wants to kill all civilians, which isn’t the case in basically any revolutions. The military doesn’t know which houses to hit, and when >1/2 of the houses are armed in the US it makes disarming all possible defectors very difficult.

I.e. your scenario of an insurgent being packaged up nicely in an identified building is dumb because the insurgent already lost to be revealed that way.

The 15 years of failed insurgency removal in Afghanistan and Iraq are great evidence of this.

[b65e8bee43c2ed0]

what was the outcome of the First Chechen War?

[Joker_vD]

Why, the Second Chechen War.

[b65e8bee43c2ed0]

okay, let me rephrase that: would it have taken two wars to subdue that tiny, sparsely populated country had that country been armed with nothing but sticks, stones, and Molotov's?

[justsomehnguy]

Ah, yes the famous sticks with "AK-74" and "RPG" on them.

It's also amusing how the stupid Soviets took two wars to subdue that tiny, sparsely populated country had that country been armed with nothing but sticks, stones, and Molotov's; while the mighty, eagle screeching top-tech first world economy with a giant student debt took checks notes two decades to accomplish check the notes again replacing Taliban with Taliban in a "country been armed with nothing but sticks, stones, and Molotov's".

[b65e8bee43c2ed0]

you appear to have misread my comment. I didn't say the Chechens were unarmed.

[justsomehnguy]

Verbatim:

> tiny, sparsely populated country had that country been armed with nothing but sticks, stones, and Molotov's?

[Joker_vD]

Probably? We can look at the English attempts at "pacifying" Ireland during the XIX and XX century... my point is, if you really need your uprising against a decisive and ruthless government to succeed, you better get foreign backing and a shitload of supplies and training from them, and even then it may be crushed; having small firearms "pre-deployed" amongst the population won't really help all that much.