One argument for citizen gun ownership holds that it is necessary for those cases in which the government becomes tyrannical, and the citizens must rise up against it.
I do not find this argument persuasive.
Now, I actually do agree with the argument’s proponents that armed citizens could make life precarious for the agents of tyranny. They could indeed.
I just think that long before we reached that point, the U.S. armed forces themselves would have been divided, and a civil war would be underway. The military is diverse, and its opinions are in large part a function of public opinion itself. In any conflict where the citizens rose up en masse to oppose the government, a large share of the military would side with the people against the state.
In such a war, the contributions of armed irregulars would be small, and we can only hope that the stronger side of the intra-military conflict would be the liberal one. Gun ownership, or not, wouldn’t matter much.
Military resistance to the government and people’s resistance to the government will co-occur, or they will not occur at all.