It’s not actually about winning against the military. The civics justification for having guns is to make harassment campaigns more accessible when necessary. (Any sustained resistance resistance campaign would have to have outside supply lines.) No modern rebel group has taken on an established military on equal footing. The goal is to make oppressing the population extremely annoying, not to actually be in control yourself. In order to actually run a government you need a different set of skills than to run a resistance campaign, but a resistance campaign might become necessary until we can restore the government to a just one.

There’s other justifications for individual ownership of firearms, but that’s the one most similar to what you’re thinking of.

What’s fucking delusional is thinking that a bunch of civilians armed with handguns and rifles could ever match a modern military should it come to violent revolution

You just have to make it expensive enough that the military doesn’t want to fight, and you need to have enough of the civilian population on your side that the gov’t can’t control them, too. As the gov’t commits atrocities against its’ own people in an attempt to crush a rebellion, it ends up creating more ideological rebels.

And anyways, you’ll note that the US has tended to get pretty fucked up when dealing with insurgencies and guerilla warfare where it can’t leverage air superiority. How many, say, Air Force pilots do you think will start refusing orders when they find out that their last ‘precision bombing’ run killed 150 children in a hospital?

Ah yes, so the only other option is to roll over, give up your freedom, and trust the government to protect you from everything. Solid logic there.

A lot of people are in the military for economic reasons; I don’t think a lot of them would turn on the fellow members of their class. Police, on the other hand…