Quote: Raymond Terrific @ 7th June 2014, 12:37 PM BSTYou still don't seem to have got the point I'm making though. An armed uprising will only work if the citizens have weapons even vaguely matching what the army has. So, in the UK, that *doesn't* mean AK-47s and hunting rifles.
Now, this is where we get into two interesting dilemmas -
1) Anti-gunners are calling for a ban on 'military style assault rifles' as they call them or modern sporting rifles as the gun community calls them. So these are either weapons of war unfit for civilian ownership due to their overwhelming fire power or they are fairly innocuous and practical tools for marksmanship, hunting and competition - akin to a bow and arrow.
2) If government militaries are all powerful then every single uprising would have been crushed due to their superior force. Despite drones and stealth bombers, wars are won by feet on the ground. Switzerland has never been invaded due to the number of armed citizens - a veritable Dad's Army on steroids. Unless you're carrying out a 'scorched earth' policy in which you level every single building and settlement, then holding areas with troops is next to impossible against such overwhelming numbers.
Certainly cruise missiles, artillery, jet fighters, etc. help to make a difference, but as is being evidenced in Afghanistan, they only proved to be useful on a tactical and not a strategic level.
