Contrary to popular believe, many totalitarian government do not shy away from arming their citizenry. History is rife with paramilitary death squads. What we do see in virtually all totalitarian governments is efforts to control the means of communication. I think this should tell us something.
The secure communication isn't the problem; it's having the commitment, discipline and the organizational operational security to use it.
I find this to be quite ironic since we now have a country run by a lawless president, who was elected with the help of a foreign, adversary and who gave a massive tax cut to billionaires and has done nothing tangible for those gun owners who voted for him.
A federal judge had to include in her ruling that presidents are not kings, which makes you think just what country are we living in when this has to be stated: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/mcgahn-testify-subpo...
Sure, it's not unusual for people to vote against their own interest; but what the people you described haven't realized is they are on the same side as the tyrant.
It's slightly delusional to think a few thousand gunmen in a country of over 300 million and an economy of nearly 20 trillion dollars could do what's required to "ruin the US".
If it would be that easy, ISIS would do it long time ago.
Besides a lot of military and police support legal gun ownership as well and I highly doubt all of them would be choosing the totalitarian side if it came down to it so it's not entirely just civilians with pop guns vs a well-armed military.
I am certainly not an advocate of terrorism. But I think recent events show that it doesn't take a lot of arms for a motivated group to overcome a well armed unmotivated group. It makes me wonder what Hong Kong would be like now if 1 in 10 people owned a rifle or hand gun. Probably in the long run the situation would be much worse, but also maybe less hopeless.
The argument I reacted to was about terrorist tactic being used to create deterrent against tyranny. Like, it talked about killing children on their way to school.
Because answer to terrorism would be more freedom or something.
US?
The difference is more than just "the winners write the history books". The methodology was different. The patriots/rebels/insurgents weren't setting off truck bombs in city centers in the hope of making people not oppose them, and not just because they didn't have truck bombs. They weren't trying to assassinate the governor. It was fundamentally a war, not terrorism.
American Civil War 2 would be totally different.
Also to add, the US military is sworn to protect the constitution and not members of the political elite. So were this extremely unlikely scenario of revolution to arise, you would definitely see a division of factions even within the military (some pro gov, others pro people). I believe there has been sufficient evidence to believe this. American soldiers would have a hard time killing other Americans.
I know this risks an admonishment by dang, but this needs to be said.
Or they can do terrorism. Assassinations, sabotage of infraestructure. Tyrants live somewhere, and they send their children to school. Collaborators(which probably would be civil servants, police and the army) also need to sleep somewhere and have children and family. They could just be shot while going home, or killed by IEDs while patrolling. Infraestructure is much easier to destroy than to repair. Killing the power grid or destroying a bridge hurts the rebellion as much or more than it does the dictatorship, but I don't think they would care much.
Having guns is also a great detterent to creeping tyranny(well, at least when the guns owners care enough to do something). If every overreach was met with hundreds of thousands of angry people with guns on Washington, they would stop overreaching.
I agree that it is quite foolish that these people support things which actually work against them, but do not understimate what hundreds of thousands of angry gunmen could do. Even if they didn't win, they would ruin the US. And making tyranny less profitable than liberty is a good protection against it.