"The point is not that you can win pitched battles against a professional army with all its ordinance as a ragtag citizens’ militia with small arms. The point is that you can fight. You can bleed them. When they come patrolling through your neighborhood, you may be able to take a couple of the fuckers with you. You might even be able to run away and do it again. Theoretically, you wouldn’t be alone and they couldn’t engage in endless “manhunts” for everyone who resisted them. And they’d never feel safe; there could be a shooter behind any window. Of course, they could call in artillery and air support and level your neighborhood; sure. What would this get them? It would anger a lot of people when innocents died and play right into the hands of the rebels. It would also make a lot of the soldiers in that professional military seriously consider whether they were doing the right thing. Finally, it would simply kill people. No one wants to rule a nation of corpses.

The aim of a tyrant is to control, not to kill. What they want is to be able to have militarized police/gestapo point guns at people and cow them into submission to whatever dictates they might want to impose. If those people are instead waiting behind their doors and ready to shoot first when the jackbooted thugs come around, they’ve already failed. So the point is to fight. If you resist, you’re not being controlled, and you’re also undermining attempts to control others who can’t or won’t fight. You might die, of course. That’s why Patrick Henry said what he famously said, more or less. As long as people can resist, they can be free, and tyrants can never succeed. But when you’re talking about using swords and knives and clubs against modem military weapons, it actually becomes pointless, because you can’t bleed them at all. They’ll just shoot you with beanbags and rubber and water cannons and microwave guns. That’s why having guns is so important."