2nd Amendment
I'd know what I thought if I hadn't read so much history. An unarmed populace is a populace subject to oppression--although what matters are modern weapons like bombs and (especially!) planes, not handguns or hunting rifles. I want impossible solutions. All my ideas depend on people being decent, when the whole premise is, of course, needing to
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The big counter-example is Europe where, today, the majority are able to avoid oppression without weapons because they control democratically-elected governments. But historically they got into that position via revolutions and urban riots of the 19th century.
In the US as well, the majority gained the ability to be free of oppression via democracy. But the US differs in that this occurred at the same time as the majority was subduing minorities (African Americans and American Indians) by violence and would not have been able to establish dominance without violence. Simultaneously, these minorities used violence to resist oppression, often losing in the process, but developing a tradition of violent self-defense against violent attacks.
Canada is the example of a country whose rural people have guns but seems to have gotten out of the trap of using them to kill each other so much (although its 19th century history vis a vis the native people is still pretty violent, I believe).
The question is whether an armed populace prevents military take-over or just provides the basis for devolution into civil war and anarchy. The general population never does well when there is a civil war, although under some conditions they may actively choose sides. (There is a big literature on how peasants deal with being in the middle of a war between insurgents and the government.)
Latin America, Africa, Asia don't seem to provide good examples for the value of arming the general public as a strategy for avoiding oppression.
But there may be more to the story.
Interesting topic to think about.
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