I think that GP's position is tenable if the tyranny comes slowly. Sure, a country-wide armed insurgency is hard to beat. That's relatively uncontroversial. If most people are comfortable as the water boils around them, however, then the armed insurgency is not going to be country-wide.

I think that argument has some basis in history (e.g. Nazi Germany), where the tyrannical government slowly got worse and worse without major internal revolts. On the other hand, there have been times where the people snapped and revolted all at once.

The U.S. army, while preventing the North from encroaching, were effectively sitting ducks and as the casualties grew so did the anti-war tide at home, until they pulled out and the south was left to their demise. The North, then separated when the U.S. arrived, bordered China, their arms supplier, and had thick jungle cover from the Ho Chi Min trail all the way to the south. While the U.S. took some pot shots at the North through bombing missions they "officially" were never invading.

This was an impossible situation from the beginning.

> South America guerrillas are unbeatable.

Bolivian insurgency failed, Guevara died. They don't always win.

The thing of it is the arms involved at the outset are irrelevant. You can't coerce a population largely unwilling to be controlled. Arms (including bombing devices) inevitably make their way into peoples hands. In the event of martial law things would fall into such disarray it's unsustainable.

I take issue with the idea that a population needs to be armed a priori with a specific set of weapons in order to repel a "tyranical government", which is a kind of boogeyman idea if I ever heard one. A tyrannical govt, comprised of a minority of people, versus the U.S. scenario is not a likely one. You'd sooner see a civil war, and even that's incredibly unlikely. But then I suppose you'd see gun regulation as evidence of tyranny.

The most tyrannical govt I can think of is the Chinese one and they have popular favor with their people. The HK situation shows that popular dissent is powerful with or without weapons.

Vietnam was backed by China and the USSR, the Taliban by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

Their most effective weapons tended strongly toward IEDs and RPGs rather than longarms.

False dichotomy.

The government doesn’t have to be in unilateral control for us to admit that citizens would have a very difficult time fighting the extremely well funded and trained military. (For the most part, they wouldn’t need to anyway, they have control of something far more powerful... banking, they’d freeze your funds and you’d be done for).

It doesn’t follow that a government that you can’t fight via conventional means gives the populous no recourse. Voting rights are still the law of the land here and civil disobedience has been effective in the past.

Secondarily it could be argued (very easily) that second amendment in the USA is about the right to maintain well regulated local militias, which at the time would have been populated by yeoman farmers bringing their own weapons.

Historically this is relevant because the revolution was fought by exactly such a set of militias on the continental side, and the British obviously thought this was an illegal action. So they needed a clause “this thing we’re doing is legal and legitimate.”

Buut there’s a difference here between a militiaman with a musket that can fire maximum 3 shots per minute, as part of the local defense force, and an independent yobbo with a hundred of round per minute assault rifle.

But no one focuses on the part of the second amendment that pertains to ‘well regulated militias’, it’s almost as if an industry that makes something with a limited audience outside of military and law enforcement has an agenda and is influencing the debate.