Tyranny generally doesn't come overnight. There are plenty of things you can ask soldiers to do that they'll feel uncomfortable about but still do it, and then in eighteen months when it's time to reenlist they decline. A decade later you've got only zealots.

> Or, that owning an assault rifle is some antidote against the best funded military in the world, which has been fighting armed insurgencies for years.

Because we sure handed it to those Iraqis, and the Vietnamese before that.

Counter-insurgency is hard. Having planes and nukes doesn't help you when the bridges and cities are friendly assets. Morale is low when you're fighting your own people. You can't guard every military resource with hundreds of soldiers, but that means the one guarded by twenty can be overrun by a hundred civilians if they're armed.

And it only takes one bullet to kill Hitler.