The military has a lot of conservative pro-gun people.
An armed (and determined) populace is quite a good deterrent.
If anything it seems to me that what is happening in the US is a cycle of increasing armed escalation. Mass shootings lead to people getting guns for home defence and personal carry. An increasingly armed populace leads police officers to be more prepared for gun violence and more willing to shoot where there is a perceived threat or risk. Increasing police shootings lead to violent protests and 'reprisal' attacks against police. More guns generally means unstable personalities are more likely to have access to powerful weapons, so more mass shootings. And so it goes on.
An armed society is a polite society? Really?
The societal problem created by unstable personalities is due to... unstable personalities, and unstable personalities tend to boost other's instabilities, a retro-action quickly escalates the problem into major ordeals: the society (armed or not) progressively becomes something else and crumbles.
Someone wanting to destroy/maim/kill will do so (armed or not), and civilians weapons rarely are the best tool for it (check, for example, the Oklahoma City bombing '1995). Arson as a weapon substitute is common, especially in no-weapon zones.
Solving the main causes of tensions (dumb dispositions addicting many citizen to very dangerous drugs, race-related hate, extreme poverty, education and economic conditions letting youngsters leading nowhere...) would reduce the will to destroy/maim/kill.
Weapons don't do anything by themselves.
Personally I'd rather put my trust in democracy.
The ongoing civilian war in Syria isn't pertinent, as it isn't "civilian vs. regular army" but many tribal factions and armies fighting each other and volatile alliances.
Iraq under Saddam also shows that armed civilians (the Kurds) can resist to a tyrannic government. Others were not well-armed and were indeed crushed.
The rebels during the 1991 uprising could not grab weapons. "U.S. troops that were deployed in southern Iraq defended arsenals or blew up them altogether to prevent the rebels from arming themselves, blocked the rebels from advancing onto Baghdad and even actively disarmed some rebel forces" (sourced at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_uprisings_in_Iraq ), in practice killing the rebellion by discouraging it.
In Myanmar civilians aren't really armed, and even decades-old ethnic guerilla groups aren't (they even lack cartridges). Read https://www.pri.org/stories/2021-06-02/souring-peace-marches...
> India in Kashmir
Kashmiri separatists are notoriously badly armed, their main approach is a sort of Intifada (throwing rocks)! As far as I know Pakistan gives very few weapons to some subgroups read as not too dangerous for them, and India yells about it but after years and years fails to show serious evidence, probably because there are too few weapons.
> Pakistan in Baluchistan.
Baloch separatists are losing not because they cannot resist, but because their cause is dying as the majority of the population (especially Pashtuns) doesn't adopt it and as the central government concedes more and mode towards decentralization/autonomy.
> More guns? Easy, just pile on more repression. It works.
I doubt so.
> Personally I'd rather put my trust in democracy.
There is no mutual exclusion between weapons and democracy. Switzerland, one of the (or rather, at least IMHO, _the_) more advanced democracy, is shock-full of weapons and has a solid weapon culture.
That's simply naive. You don't think powerful elites do and will try everything to gain and maintain power over the peasants? Personally I'd rather put my trust in having some way to fight back when the inevitable happens instead of being powerless.
> India in Kashmir
Not sure why you think Kashmir is tyrannical? Your other examples are also flawed. The fights happening in lets say Syria are tribal infighting - similar to gang fighting on a larger scale. Similar to Chicago gangs on a larger scale.
Despite all the flaws of Assad, most Syrians like him. It's the same thing as what happened in Libya or Iraq. Regime change wars is what destroyed those countries thanks to which there's slavery back in Libya.
This has happened several times in history. People get disarmed, then their rights get taken away. The most recent example is Venezuela.
2012: "Venezuela bans private gun ownership"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-18288430
2017: Venezuela: Video Shows Armored Vehicle Rolling Over Protesters
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/venezuela-video-shows-ar...
2019: "MSNBC Admits: Because Venezuelans Were Disarmed, They Have No Power Against the Government"
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2019/05/01/msnbc-...
I have friends in Hong Kong who literally prayed that USA doesn't give away their guns.
An army pretty much knows the truism stating that occupying is more easy if the zone is gun-free.
There is an often-neglected complement: by the same principle an army fighting against another which occupies a nation usually try to deliver weapons to civilians rebelling against the invader, even if manufacturing and delivering them dissipates very precious resources. It was quite patent during WW2, for example in France where the OSS and SOE parachuted a huge amount of weapons to the Résistance and Maquis movements. In the same vein the German army, during the invasion, quickly confiscated civilian weapons (they were registered) and was then very reluctant to deliver weapons to their local sympathizers (at first and for an extended period they bluntly refused).
For example, let's say you want to send the army or police to (let's say) take control over some city and implement a curfew. If the populace is armed and decides to oppose you, your calculus now includes whether it's worth killing many people to get your aims. That might make it politically impossible to do, either because it's now no longer worth it, or because the army itself might resist you.
Obviously those are extreme scenarios. You can see many, many cases where a small armed populace managed to "win" against a much larger army, because unlike what some people think, war is very rarely an all-out "get your way at any cost" affair.
1. If that were the case, then what's even the point of freedom of speech or any individual liberty either since the government can always trample them without a problem? You could use that reasoning to argue against literally anything that the government would oppose.
2. That's actually not the case as has been proven several times in history - including recently in Afghanistan as of this moment. The ground troops of Taliban haven't been able to be defeated - neither by USA (for 20 years) nor by the Soviets few decades ago.
Another example would be USA losing to Vietnam.
In a war scenario where the guns are used, both sides do not simply line up & start shooting and whoever has the biggest guns wins. Guerrillas can beat massive armies and ammo. If inferior forces couldn't defeat bigger stronger ones, then the Arabs and British would still be ruling everywhere.
As someone mentioned this in another post: "The argument is generally that a well-armed civilian populace is ungovernable without their consent. Could a modern army nuke them or firebomb them into oblivion? Sure. But then they'd be "governing" a burnt-out husk of a country and likely have become an international pariah to boot. Occupying a hostile territory while keeping the population alive and productive involves having a relatively small number of soldiers on the ground managing things and keeping people in line, and that system rapidly becomes infeasible if the locals are far more numerous and armed with semi-automatic weapons. Of course the odds of a situation like that happening are extremely low, but then again my grandparents never imagined the possibility of their country being occupied during WW2 either, so who knows what the future can bring."