Don't ever let anyone brainwash you into thinking we don't have the money and guns either.
Everyone who believes guns are some kind of savior or last-ditch protector is fucking stupid.
There is a reason why, during westward expansion, the first thing towns did when they got two nickels to rub together to buy bricks to build a church was ban guns.
There are so many real-world examples of guns being useless that it defies logic and belief that people cling to the myth.
There are so few examples of guns being useful that those examples are the irrelevant exceptions to the norm.
Every single valley in Afghanistan has a small village along the valley stream where every household has at least one automatic rifle. That is what a society saturated with weaponry looks like: paranoid, tribal, and rapey.
In the US, the second "the good guys" show up with their AR and wish.com tacticool gear and start to pose any actual threat, the bad guys will retreat behind fortified walls and fences and start dropping JDAMs.
And it got its ass kicked in Afghanistan. Trillions of dollars and countless lives later and a bunch of Pashtun tribesmen with AK-47s and RPG-7s have the country back, and a bunch of our materiel for our trouble.
Because the only thing on the planet more dangerous than a United States Special Forces operator is a man with nothing to lose.
(And what loss)
What you might do better to note is both of those conflicts consisted of the US invading someone else's home soil to effect change and being outlasted in terms of public interest - a public who at home were living peaceful, first world lifestyles.
Everyones little civil war fantasy is when the fight is happening on your home turf to start with.
I don't have any sort of civil war fantasy, but I think that holding out against a military deployment in-country until it became socially and politically untenable would be pretty reasonable.
There's many dictatorships which are considerably older then that, yet weapons are easily available or common - Iraqis didn't lack for small arms during Saddam's rule.
That's how war works now. It's always been true to some extent but conflict is just getting more and more asymmetrical with no obvious upper limit.
At some point the Houthi in a cave with a five hundred dollar DJI drone and rage in his heart is king in that world: the only way to lose is to care about something that hasn't already been taken from you. You'll never kill all of them. Not with a nuclear bomb.
Whereas the Houthis are a sufficient non-issue that shipping traffic treats them as an insurance cost, the US Navy's biggest problem is they'd really like laser rather then missile to cut that drone out of the sky (which is to say: they enjoyed Iranian backing meaning they were smuggled surprisingly capable antiship missiles, and they won't be getting many more of those now).
Because I can tell you, most of your countrymen do not agree. Most of humanity doesn't agree. And as long as there are so many examples -- from the French Revolution to Vietnam -- of people rising up against their oppressors, people will hope that should times become hard enough, they could do the same.
If it's the coup or something your own army may not be willing to trade fire with civilian groups but may still be willing to engage in.softer subduing efforts like arrests, water cannons, etc.
It's rich to call people stupid when you're missing the obvious point while engaging in a fantasy of all out war between civilians with guns and an army trying to exterminate them.
“But we have guns” is fantasy.
The Afghanistan war killed about 3500 U.S. & allied soldiers, and about 300,000 Afghans. [2]
The Iraq war killed about 5000 U.S. & allied soldiers, and about 1 million Iraqis. [3]
U.S. military power since WW2 can basically be summed up by "We can't win, but we can still kill you." If you end up dead, your side may win, but that's cold comfort (literally) for you.
The root of the discrepancy is the difference between winning as in annihilating your opponent and winning as in getting them to do what you want. Oftentimes, military force and lots of deaths actually just entrenches opposing ideology. Nothing like a common enemy that's trying to kill you to get people to band together. But you can still end up with a lot of dead people that are ideologically victorious. Always more people where they came from, and people may switch over to your cause.
Also, the huge irony of the Vietnam war is that by 1989, 15 years after the North Vietnamese "won", Vietnam was one of the most intensely capitalist countries on Earth. Because they realized that communism didn't work, and they'd all be better off with free trade and markets. Given the US's stated goal of preventing the spread of communism in southeast Asia, they would've been far more effective just letting the communists win and run the country for a few years and then dealing with the consequences of that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20241203211818/https://ucdp.uu.s...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
> U.S. military power since WW2 can basically be summed up by "We can't win, but we can still kill you." If you end up dead, your side may win, but that's cold comfort (literally) for you.
Some of them, yes. But even for those who do die: haven't you heard "give me liberty or give me death"? Many people do feel this way.
> Also, the huge irony of the Vietnam war is that by 1989, 15 years after the North Vietnamese "won", Vietnam was one of the most intensely capitalist countries on Earth.
Yet where is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie? Why do Vietnamese billionaires not run the government like they do that of America, and why does their government not have to kowtow to American business interests like Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea do? Because despite opening up their economy, their political system is far from a liberal democracy. You're making a false equivalence to try and pretend that the Vietnamese war was a no-op, that they should have just rolled over and accepted defeat like you're suggesting all the peoples of the world do.
This quickly falls apart in the US if we go civil war on each other. We are technologically fragile. If just a small portion of the people of the US went around shooting electrical distribution, fuel refining and NG compression facilities the US would have one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the last 50 years, maybe longer.
This said, there are a number of countries that would love to see us do this to each other.
What about gun violence against the machine? ;-)