Don't take this the wrong way, but I can say as one of the uniform-wearing types out of DoD that the effort to ensure military personnel won't carry out grossly Unconstitutional orders is far more important for national liberty than guns.
Your automatic rifle may match up well to a soldier's, but it won't match up at all to crew-served weapons, JDAM laser-guided bombs, cruise missiles, tanks, etc.
And even more important than technology is training, logistics, organization, and discipline which is something that all branches of the military will kick a militia's ass up and down the coast with.
The militia was intended to be a way to defend America against foreign invasion without having to maintain a standing army, as a standing army was considered dangerous for liberty.
But the Second Amendment wasn't intended to be used to fight against the government, or a standing army. Which is well, since the standing army is here now, and better than you at fighting.
Instead we do all we can to ensure that everyone from E-1 to O-10 understand what they're fighting for (the Constitution, not the military), who is in charge (the civilians), and what constraints are placed on their domestic operations (e.g. Posse Comitatus). That way an order to do something illegal like establish martial law in a town (for non-"Title 32" forces) would be instantly recognized as abnormal and wrong.
The military has about 2.3 million people, compared with 120 million civilians that could potentially fight [1]. Out of curiosity, how many of those civilians do you think would need to join a militia for it to be strong enough to resist the military?
The problem is it's not a mere "numbers" game, otherwise there would have been no war with Britain when the Thirteen Colonies started fighting due to the extreme disparity in numbers between "available fighting colonists" and "troops Britain could transport across the Atlantic".
And that was in an era without aviation, aircraft like the AC-130 "Spooky" or A-10 Thunderbolt II could do horrendous injury to dozens or hundreds of people at a time. You would need things like man-portable ground-to-air missiles to have a chance against those, but there's absolutely no way things like those will ever be available to the general public; the risk of them being used against civilian airliners is far too extreme.
I realize the US military is much stronger per capita, but in a hypothetical contest, what's the chance of defeat vs. 120 million infantry in a militia?
It's not a question of "defeat". It's a question of control, whether that be control of infrastructure, control of territory, etc., and the advantage there lies with professional militaries.
Properly supplied and constructed, lines of control can be established that are nearly impregnable against the kind of assault a militia could hope to muster, especially considering that they won't have close air support like the military will.
More to the point, even during the American Revolutionary War itself a great proportion of the people had better things to do than join the militia or the Continental Army to overthrow the British. Many were avowed patriots. Some were Loyalists who were willing to fight for King and country. But most just wanted to get on with their lives and didn't do much to support or harass either side, and the effect would be even worse nowadays.
I mean if you could get 120 million militia in one spot to attack somewhere, that place would likely fall if only due to running out of ammunition. But 120 million people in one spot, fighting a military, is something that would not long last once the artillery and bombers are vectored in.
I've never been clear why people think "guns" will protect them from a government that has massive technological and economic resources at their disposal.
I'm not saying you won't be alive. And I know guerrilla techniques can keep these kinds of conflicts going for decades. But what will you really have besides some quasi-freedom?
To me, the much more important weapons of (using your example) the Revolutionary War here in the U.S. were the intellectual weapons sharpened by the Enlightenment that were used to create the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in the first place.
Simply knowing that citizens are armed will curtail the most egregious of police behavior. The 2nd amendment isn't about going to war on a national scale, its about the last line of defense against petty local thugs with badges.
>I've never been clear why people think "guns" will protect them from a government that has massive technological and economic resources at their disposal.
Those economic resource, of course, were taken from the population. Cutting off the oxygen in this area, so to speak, might be far more effective than guns. Guns, as it happens, are what implicitly lay behind the government's ability to take your money.
Do you mean, "Let's not pay taxes" as a revolutionary tactic? Would that really work in the world of complex financial instruments, deficit spending, international aid, etc?
The implicit violence argument behind taxes never held a lot of water with me. I pay taxes because I like interstates, Pell grants, enforcement of certain federal regulations (environmental, labor, etc), among other things.
If the Farm Bill supported welfare, then yes. The others... not so much.
But those things aren't direct effects of taxes, they're the direct result of legislative and executive action that can be, in part, enabled by taxes. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
You're missing his point. You could have all the guns in the world but that isn't going to change the fact that Americans don't care they are being monitored and spied on. Including the vast majority of ardent supporters of the 2nd amendment.
And even if it is so, would you rather way until it comes to such violence and massacre between the government and the population? You would really wait until US becomes another Syria?
His point was that if the gun defenders really cared that much about "freedoms", they'd help protect the 4th amendment and 1st amendment, too - right now.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. (Thomas Jefferson)