I wouldn't call my ancestors 'helpless' considering their multiple armed rebellions and constant resistance after being conquered, or examples I'm less acutely aware of like the French or Polish resistance during WW2. It's also worth noting that while this resistance was very much detrimental to the hostile government, it was never the primary factor of its downfall.
And now you know why gun registry laws regularly get torpedoed.
Hard to round up all the guns if you don't actually know who has what.
Historically this is exactly what happens.
Proponents of gun registries know this, want this. People who value their freedom have to fight a (so far, winning) battle to maintain their Constitutionally-protected rights.
Therefore the right to bear arms as a defense against tyranny is mostly empty words. The way to prevent tyranny is robust public institutions and a democratic culture. Weakly democratic states fall to autocrats all the time. There is no culture of democracy so the number of power holders a would-be autocrat has to cow is few. Democracy, real democracy, involves orders of magnitude more people, it's that much more difficult to overthrow.
Of course the later would never be hard in America, considering just how many guns there are that would not get swept up... But the first is still easier.