Resisting occupation or engaging in terrorism against a foreign power are completely different scenarios than pushing back against democratically blessed bureaucratic overreach.

The KillDozer is an appropriate example. I cheered for that guy, along with many others. Some of the corrupt town officials got their comeuppance. But what did it really accomplish systematically?

When people criticize small arms in terms of resisting government, its usually because the government has better toys, and assume they would simply roll over the problem with tanks and planes. Thus you work your way back around to an occupation scenario.

The issue is that those toys have workarounds, especially for locals. The soviets ran into these problems several times. Sending tanks piloted by locals to put down locals often ended in a stalemate or worse (The locals cant tell whose piloting the tank, the tankers can identify their neighbors however)

If you want to narrow things down to guns keeping local politics straight, there was that recent business with the hardware store shotgun vs Shinzo Abe. The shotgun gentleman seems to have gotten every single demand met.

> When people criticize small arms in terms of resisting government, its usually because the government has better toys

But that is not the point I'm making. Like sure, I agree that a militia wielding small arms can resist an invading army, say in the case that the US military was defeated or didn't respond to an area because it wasn't considered strategic enough.

The point I am making is that it's fallacious to think that weapons can do anything to push back against homegrown democratically approved bureaucratic tyranny. As I said in another comment - how can a gun, explosives, or even a tank alleviate the problems you will face from not getting a building permit?

Secession?

But this is what I'm talking about... Keep following that idea to flesh out the details. If there are enough people on board to make it an actual secession, then you also have enough voting power to just get friendly people into city hall and either eliminate permit requirements or at least rubber stamp them.

If there aren't enough people for that, then it's not actually a secession but rather just a few rebellious people the bureaucracy will eventually grind down. And the hyper-individualist suitcase nuke idea from Snow Crash is quite compelling, but so far seemingly untenable.

And neither one does anything about the extra-governmental system of control when you go to sell your house and the bank cartel sets the price much lower due to all the "unpermitted" work.

A big problem the communists had during Tiananmen Square was that PLA units were generally assigned to the localities that they drew their soldiers from. So Beijing was covered primarily by Beijinger soldiers. This was problematic because it turns out they didn't want to shoot their own, so they had to bring in PLA units from far away before the crackdown could really begin in earnest. They corrected this problem by mixing up units (so PLA units are stationed from places far away from where the soldiers were sourced). They also added actual riot police in the form of the PAP so they didn't have only PLA soldiers with tanks to put down internal insurrections.

As far as resisting "government" in a democracy, it is much more likely that one side of an ideological divide wants to subdue the other (or both want to subdue each other using force). More like Republicans vs. Democrats and not really the people vs. the US military. One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.