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Exactly. Particularly if you are also fundamentally opposed to preparing for its use, and particularly to organizing in any fashion ("We are the people who, when someone orders us to breathe, suffocate to death. It's our superpower."). They mumble about "2nd amendment remedies" coming someday, eventually, when the gubment finally "goes too far"… and when their past idea of "goes too far" finally comes to pass, well, it's not that bad, but next time…
These are family and friends I'm talking about, and they have such terrible understandings of how successful rebellions and insurgencies are fought. Ridiculously wrong understandings of how the American Revolution worked, how the Taliban worked, how "fourth-generation warfare" works; it's all 80s action movie fantasies about how "lone wolf" fighters with naught but their rifle and the clothes on their back will Chuck Norris their way through hordes of faceless mooks to inevitable victory.
Back in my junior year of high school (98-99), we had an exchange student from the former Yugoslavia, briefly escaping the wars. And (until lefty classmates stopped asking because they didn't like the answers) she had interesting things to say about the conflict. My later readings have mostly matched what she said: that people and families who tried to hunker down on their lonesome — particularly those who "headed for the hills" and tried to make a go of it in the woods — got picked off by those who grouped up. It was the organized, the militias and such, who survived.
As I've seen it put, a rebellion is not going from one government to zero to one, but from one government to two to one. A successful rebellion is a parallel state — as is a successful mafia; the difference between the two is mostly down to political ambitions (as in the case when the Ming restorationism of the "Three Harmonies Society" degenerated into the modern "Triads" who draw their name from it).
In reply to Isaac Asimov's dictum that "violence is the last resort of the incompetent," fellow sci-fi author Jerry Pournelle replied, "you're right; the competent use it before it's the last resort."
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