> The reason I mentioned Moscow in my comment is to show that people were not armed in Russia either. However, the tanks were not ready to shoot and the coup fa

> The reason I mentioned Moscow in my comment is to show that people were not armed in Russia either. However, the tanks were not ready to shoot and the coup failed. Authoritarian regimes do not fail because a few people with rifles make noise in the wilderness, they fail when they run out of the conviction of their own enforcement structures that the regime must survive. The revolutions in Eastern Europe happened without a single gorilla fighter and those were some of the most policed societies in history. Have you ever asked yourself the question how did it happen? I'm well aware of that. I'm not disputing that an authoritarian regime can fall that way, and in fact that's the only way some can fall (e.g. a well-established one). However, your thesis seems to be that civilian arms are pretty much totally useless in every case, which I disagree with. > Yet, last year a big part of the executive branch of the US government tried to subvert the elections and to remain on power. Stopping it did not take mobilizing local militias That's a different problem: that American "militias" are groups of fringe wackos drawn exclusively one from one end of the political spectrum. > So, if you want to stop an authoritarian government in your country, guns are the last thing that one should invest in. Maybe one should invest just in case of some very improbable scenario, but usually, if it comes to the guns, then the fight is already lost. It's not like people can do one anti-authoritarian thing, and one anti-authoritarian thing only. Personally I think an armed civilian uprising would mainly be an input into a very chaotic transitional period, not some standalone effort, but those cases, I'd rather have it than not.