The trouble with this meme is that it is utter bullshit. While the political theory of the Second Amendment is facially plausible, it turns out that it is actually just plain wrong.
How is an armed public preventing tyranny in the United States right now?
It isn't and it won't.
Armed citizens are no competition for the U.S. military if it is deployed. They aren't even competition for law enforcement.
The U.K. and Japan both have near complete bans on gun ownership.
Do they have far fewer murders than the U.S. does?
Yes.
Do they are far fewer mass shootings and mass killings?
Yes.
Are they tyrannies?
No. Both are more democratic and show more respect for the rule of law than the United States does at the moment.
Armed intimidation by private citizens was actually one factor of many that made the Third Reich possible.
Germany saw significant political violence from the fall of the Empire and the rise of the Republic through the German Revolution of 1918–1919, until the rise of the Nazi Party to power with 1933 elections and the proclamation of the Enabling Act of 1933 that fully broke down all opposition. The violence was characterized by assassinations and by confrontations between right-wing groups such as the Freikorps (sometimes in collusion with the state), and left-wing organisations such as the Communist Party of Germany.Between 1919 and 1922, there were at least 354 politically-motivated murders by right-wing extremists, primarily Freikorps, and a minimum of 22 murders by left-wing extremists. Compared to right-wing murders, left-wing motivated murders were criminally prosecuted much more frequently and received significantly harsher sentencing.
And, of course, there was armed resistance by Jews, most famously, in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which failed.
The reality is that there are really no examples in world history of an armed civilian population preventing tyranny. Even the American Revolution, which inspired the Second Amendment, was fought by state organized militias that banded together to form a state sponsored military insurgency, not by armed private citizens organizing themselves privately.
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Was just rereading Neil Stephenson's "Fall" which has most of the central US converting to "Ameristans" over the next two generations. Basically, in locally small areas, religious crazys with guns take over and heaven help anyone that doesn't fit the local mold. The federal government decides (off camera) that it's just not worth the effort fix the problem and basically writes off everything but the interstate highways.
What about pipelines? Railroads? Electrical grid? Electricity generation?
It's only a couple of chapters of the book and details are thin on the ground. Being a Stephenson book, it has a high libertarian bias, so I guess trading grain for gas and running lots of generators.
The more plausible nightmares become, the scarier they get.
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