Vietnam beat the US. The Taliban is beating the US. The US was founded when farmers used guerrilla warfare tactics against the current world superpower. South America guerrillas are unbeatable.
It's really your position that is untenable.
It's really your position that is untenable.
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.
I think that what you describe as the boiling frog scenario would be the best possible strategy for a government that is concerned about its policies being forcefully rejected if implemented all at once.
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.
Their most effective weapons tended strongly toward IEDs and RPGs rather than longarms.