Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

Your estimate of "a couple of rednecks" is off by orders of magnitude. There are millions of AR-15's in private hands in the United States. Those are just a fraction of the 300 million privately owned guns in the US. This country is armed to the teeth.

Still wouldn't do anything to a malicious government controlling the army. And for overthrowing government you don't need to be armed - see dozens of examples all over the world - the army is made of citizens as well after all.

So, no, it doesn't make any sense in the current age to say you own guns to protect yourself from the government.

> the army is made of citizens as well after all.

That's probably not the case for HK.

> Still wouldn't do anything to a malicious government controlling the army.

Except that an army cannot fight on 10 fronts at the same time. When you have a whole country turning against you, you can't be there at every single place every second with a regular army. On the contrary a regular army would be beaten up in no time.

You also have to take in account that it's much more likely there would be rogue generals turnings against the power in place so general + armed people is a good catalyst.

You're also assuming that the army wouldn't fracture under an armed populace uprising.

Honestly, that's probably a hugely underappreciated factor that would make fighting a war like that even harder.

The CIA also has a document (sorry, I don't remember the name) detailing ways that civilians can sabotage efforts by doing things like holding extra meetings, etc.

I wonder if anyone would stay in the military to better thwart it.

Look at politics in the US. It would never be the whole country against a dictator. A much more likely scenario would be something like 50% supporting the dictator and 50% rebelling. I don't know how it would play out, but I know it would be ugly. The reasonable course for most people would be to flee.

I believe this is the document. Page 28 of the book, (18 of the PDF) "General Interference with Organizations and Production"

https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/...

That's exactly what I'm saying in my post and also noting you don't need the populace to be armed.

I took that into account and explicitly mentioned it, adding that you don't need the people to be armed for that to happen.

That's it!