You tell me how well your pea shooter serves you the next time you try to take down the government and it's tanks and jet fighters.
You cannot control an entire country with tanks, fighters, or battleships.
A fighter jet cannot stand on street corners, handing out no-assembly edicts.
A fighter jet cannot kick in your door at 3AM to search your house for contraband.
A fighter jet is useless for maintaining a police state.
Police
are needed to maintain a police state.
No matter how many police you have, they will
always
be outnumbered by the citizenry. Even in East Germany.
This is why it is
vital
for your police to be as well-armed as possible, and for your citizenry to be as disarmed as possible.
When every random citizen has a handgun concealed on them, kicking in doors becomes a lot fucking riskier when the gunfire is going both ways.
There's not a single example in modern history of an armed civilian uprising that has achieved a governmental change. Not one.
The 1989 Romanian Revolution is one.
The military stripped off their colors, and fought alongside civilians.
But that doesn't count because the military members were previously in the military!
How about South Africa? The blacks kept fighting the Afrikaners, until they relented, and changed the SA government.
But there was external political pressure, which totally invalidates the efforts of South African resistance!
I've got one! You're not going to like it, but it counts:
The post-Cold War Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
But the US helped them a while ago, and despite having subsequently abandoned Afghanistan, that support totally invalidates the actions of individual Afghan civilians!
...sigh.
This might have been a valid claim back in the 18th century and before, when the power level between weapons were more even. Today? Armed revolutionaries either become terrorists, or they become dead.
...being labeled a terrorist by an external party suddenly strips them of their citizenship status?
Or are they still armed civilians?
They don't become successful at overthrowing a rogue government.
If we changed the designation to "terrorist", I think we could both agree on some successes.
But civilians aren't terrorists, eh?