We have the right to bear arms for a reason. Governments will eventually push citizens to a breaking point.
Two points: 1. Although it wasn't the intention, the 2A creates the conditions for insurgency. Super powers don't do well against insurgency. 2. The military by nature is much much less likely to turn against the citizenry. The militarization of the police is much more likely.
While comforting, is this actually true?
We have seen this happen very recently with protests occurring - yes the police were there and heavily armed, but so was the actual military, who came swiftly to the president's beckoning.
It's an organization that prioritizes rank, the chain of command, and doing what you're told without question or hesitation. There even seems to be quite a lot of perks (think education, monetary reparations) to getting your hands dirty so that elected officials don't have to.
There's plenty of scenarios where the utility benefits of guerilla warfare (to the guerillas) outweigh the economic costs. To go right to Godwin's law as an extreme example, if every jew in 1930s Germany had engaged in guerilla warfare against the government instead of meekly getting on the trains, the utility benefits to them as a group would have wildly exceeded the economic costs of the hypothetical civil war.
Of course, the best gun is one you never need to fire. A rational alternate-universe government would foresee this, and know that by pursuing policy goal X they would create conditions where guerilla war was utility-positive for group Y, which would hurt the economy and so also the utility for the government. So the government would be (depending on the hypothetical ability of group Y do impede it) incentivised to pick policies that don't leave group Y no recourse but to start shooting.
Mutual armament as common knowledge leads to incentives for both sides to cooperate.
Also look at stuff like the Millennium Challenge, in which the United States Navy had multiple battleships with the latest and greatest technology sunk to the bottom of the ocean because of a couple guys riding around on bicycles passing notes and some small rafts with explosives.
An individual can do a lot.
You hardly need it.
You can see what guerrilla forces do to the standing army of a superpower, by looking at Iraq and Afghanistan. They can't stop it, its demoralizing, and even if the superpower kills at a 2 to 1 or greater ratio, the losses are considerable. And in this case that force would be domestic, so all the negative PR/image consequences are radically amplified (your army might kill at a 2 to 1 or 4 to 1 ratio, but every one of those citizens that you kill makes the general population hate you more and brings out more recruits for the opposition).
The US has maybe 12 to 15 million functional, trained former soldiers, many of whom have been to war, they know everything the military knows, they have experience in every aspect of combat, and they have a vast number of arms and a hundred million sympathetic people behind them. It makes Afghanistan look like a cakewalk. A standing army trying that in the US would be butchered, they'd bleed like a stuck pig. And that's to say nothing of the vast internal sabotage and assassinations that would immediately begin to occur and would never cease; it would instantly split the military into factional pieces that would fight against eachother.
> That though all lances split on you, > All swords be heaved in vain, > We have more lust again to lose > Than you to win again.
~ G. K. Chesterton - The Ballad of the White Horse - Book III https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1719/1719-h/1719-h.htm#link2...
The side that is willing to loose one more time than the "winning" side is willing to win ... they win in the end.