I assume you're referring the United States - it's worth noting that the well-armed states like Texas and Florida have rejected draconian restrictions while mostly disarmed states like California and New York might as well be Australia.
Florida is the 40th state by gun ownership per capita, California is 43rd, Texas is 26th. Saying “well-armed states like Texas and Florida […] mostly disarmed states like California” is an example of employing partisan-leaning based stereotypes (EDIT: And, really, probably ones driven by which states of which leanings have governors prominently in the news right now for partisan reasons), and not any real criteria of “well-armed” vs. “mostly-disarmed” states.
California has the second most number of privately held guns in absolute terms.
Perhaps your mental model about gun ownership & pandemic response could use a recalibration?
Truly: when have private arms been indispensable in advancing the cause of liberty in the US? We have lots of examples of expanding freedoms and liberties, and even a few of successfully resisting the curtailing of same (though we actually seem pretty bad at that despite all our guns, and tend to fix those things later, if we do at all, rather than avoid them in the first place), but when have guns been what did the trick? The closest thing I can think of is the Civil War, in which some organized regiments fought with personal muskets and rifles until they were issued something (much) better, but, like, a lot of those private arms landed on the "preserve slavery" side of that conflict, which seems to be a recurring problem with the private-arms-preserve-liberty thing, which is that they seem to be at least as useful for doing the opposite. They played a role in escalating criminal violence (e.g. Bleeding Kansas) without which, maybe, the course of the war would have been significantly different, but that's getting pretty far out into "butterfly flapping its wings in Japan" in terms of tracing causality or necessity, and again, the "keep people literally in chains" side got at least as much mileage out of private arms as the "but maybe don't, though" side, in that part of the conflict.
[EDIT] Downvoters: I'm very interested in counter-examples, so please do post them, if you've got 'em.
I guess John Brown triggering massive paranoia and escalation toward civil war should count.
Having the ability to defend oneself makes it less likely that one will have to defend oneself.
The best I can figure as a credible argument for private arms ownership, is that it's a canary-in-a-coal-mine: states that retain private arms ownership probably aren't heading toward tyranny, but ones that lose them might—might—be. Seems pretty weak, still.
Simply, when a pro-liberty or pro-democracy position is popular enough, guns don't seem to be needed—not even the threat of them, mass resistance absent guns seems to suffice. When those positions are not popular, guns don't have have a history of helping—in fact, they tend to be used to suppress those positions, if they play a role at all.
Or do they? Again, I'd love some examples. I'm a big fan of argument-from-what's-actually-happened, when it comes to politics (and economics, for that matter) and my inability to find much of that sort of evidence in favor of widespread private firearms ownership, specifically when it's justified as being necessary to preserve liberty (there may remain other reasons to keep them around, but that's the usual argument for why we must not touch the 2nd Amendment, in the US), is why I'm at where I'm at on that issue.
Damn near everything we quibble about in politics is about marginal outcomes.
However, what I can tell, they're surely not that important, and any effect they do have is weak enough that even small effects that make them a liability to liberal democracy—which effects I believe are in evidence, given the clear role they've played as a tool for enforcing popular but illiberal positions—could easily nullify the benefits.
It is weak. For instance, Nazi were cool with private guns and made it easier to own them. They liked themselves the guns and violence. And they were heading toward tyranny full speed.
Most scholarly work shows that Nazi government used gun registration to disarm the populations they wanted to oppress.
By the time Nazi occupied France, the Germany was dictatorship for a long time. There was no moving anywhere on that topic. And it is absurd to use occupied territory as argument on this point.
If it were you could argue that most places always had curfews since most businesses aren't allowed to be open during the night regardless of covid.
Also I don't believe statistics exist for which states have more guns than others. And I also don't think your comment has any kind of real basis in research as to correlation between COVID lock downs and gun ownership, other than conservative voters being anti-everything in regards to coronavirus.
Though the correlation is heavily confounded, obviously. Red states by definition have a bunch of conservatives, who both despise lockdowns and are more likely to have guns. So it’s unclear how much firearms matter, strictly.
“Well-armed-and-free”? Things aren’t “normal” here. Our hospitals are barely able to function because this state is full of chucklefucks who think everything is a conspiracy.
This isn’t freedom. This is stupidity.
But hey, at least you have your guns.
A government just looking the other way and letting people die for purely ideological reasons is not something to be proud of. Altering our behavior on an individual level is exactly what needs to happen during a pandemic.