But do armed citizens really still think they can defy an out of control state? Didn't that line of thinking die with Waco?
They have demonstrated that if enough of the population disagrees with the notions of government and are provisionally armed, they can prevent a permanent change in control.
So at some level there is validation of the idea that an individual right to bear arms is a check on totalitarianism. I hope we don't ever have to test that idea of course.
Heck, even the first day of Waco supports the point, the BATF goons came in shooting (by their own admission they started first) and were repelled. A lot more than 4 would have been killed (note, some were own goals) if the Branch Dividians hadn't ceased fire when they retreated. It has been noted since then to not make that mistake....
Also think about acceptable costs to the foot soldiers, so to speak. Take the Connecticut example I mention elsewhere: how many officers would die trying to take away the guns of 300K civilians before they'd mutiny? What small fraction of point defenses taking an officer's life would be sufficient for that?
There's an apropos Solzhenitsyn quote from The GULAG Archipelago that also speaks to the very different cultural DNA we have:
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked.
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"
Waco could have easily happened 150 years prior and had a similar outcome; fundamentally a small group cannot resist the power of the state in a head-to-head confrontation. It's only a popular uprising that can put real pressure on the power of the state. If a group of people in one place resort to violence, the state can crush them, but as with terrorism, you cannot wage war against an idea, unless the idea is held only by completely powerless people.
Oddly enough, those rednecks you mock are more likely one of the most responsible groups who do collect guns. Inner city youths and those backed by the drug trade are the real problem.
Yet people are more than willing to pass laws to make acts that are illegal even more illegal without fixing the underlying problems; namely the drug war.