It's more about power projection, a last resort protection level that significantly increases the bar for total subjugation, than it is a tangible strategy towards bettering the world.

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.

Huh, what makes you think army or cops would not support totalitarian side? Typically, in turn toward more totalitarian, army and cops are first target for recruitment.

Targeted for recruitment = all will support the cause?

ISIS was incredibly successful at beating an organized (although not great quality) military with small arms and improvised weapons. A lot of the military equipment they got was stolen. They really may have been able to take over Iraq if a number of foreign powers did not intervene against them.

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.

They have done that with army and army like structures, not just with terrorist tactic. ISIS in USA is limited to terrorist tactic and did not achieved all that much.

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.

> I have hard time to find situation where it actually worked that way in the past.

US?

That was armed insurrection, not terrorism.

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.

The minute companies of Massachusetts did constitute a well-armed militia, I would argue in the sense intended by the 2nd Amendment. They were not just gun owners, they were men trained and drilled, often with the leadership of locals who had served in two previous wars.

The US wrested control of territory from a massively over-extended empire across the Atlantic.

American Civil War 2 would be totally different.

When? Civil war involved armies and so did war for independence. Natives lost.

More like terrorism as a crude form of mutually assured destruction. It doesn't have to work, there just needs to be a credible threat of a really unpleasant amount of damage.

ISIS does not fight for freedom. It's a doomsday suicide cult.