Politics

See, I don't disagree that the threat of armed resistance is part of the strength of successful nonviolent protest - I explicitly noted as much in my first comment, even.

My point there was that nonviolent activism can work. It doesn't always work, and it's not the only path, but the idea that nonviolent protest cannot and never has worked is simply not in-line with reality.

Going back to my original point, a 'well-armed' population does not present a fundamentally different threat to a tyrannical government than a poorly-armed one.

If the government has significant (even if minority) support, then it has a large number of armed supporters on its side - and usually the more enthusiastic, fringe types who are more looking for an excuse to apply violence to their countrymen, rather than the normal, "I just want to live in peace" types with a rifle in their hunting cabinet. In other words, an armed population also necessarily means armed fascist supporters - there's no real solution that involves arming the masses but excluding individuals of a popular political leaning without getting dangerously into tyrannical territory to begin with. The immediate effect of an armed population, in that case, is unlikely to be positive - as long as the government perceives its potential force in the civilian population to be superior to the potential force wielded by the civilian opposition - and even without ideologically-supported groups getting 'special treatment', this is likely - an armed population is not going to evoke a meaningfully different response than an unarmed one. When there is considerable support, the government will continue to rely on its partisans; when there is not considerable support, the government is likely to fall regardless.

If a government does not have significant support, then the threat of their own national military, which generally reflects the support of the general population unless recruited from a very narrow demographic therein (which is unusual in modern mass militaries because of the sheer manpower requirements of modern warfare), is far greater than any number of civilian militiamen with guns. National militaries are not only better trained and equipped for actual combat (which often does not end up being the case in government overthrows, but the threat is there), but extremely well-placed, both physically and socially, for coups, with officers in particular having connections in both the enlisted and the tyrannical civilian government; though even coups by noncoms and other enlisted men are attested to on occasion. National militaries are typically stationed strategically, meaning any turn of the national military means all the vital pathways of the nation - for both civilian and government purposes - are suddenly subject to the disposition of the national military.

On top of that, in the case of an actual prolonged and intensive confrontation between civilian militia and a national military or paramilitary, the usefulness of civilian firearms on grounds of logistics very rapidly declines as usage, poor maintenance, and circumstance begins to require repair and replacement, not to mention the supply of ammunition in the correct caliber.

In the case of a prolonged but low-intensity confrontation between civilian militia and a national military or paramilitary, the usefulness of civilian firearms also declines, but at a slower rate and for slightly different reasons. Ownership and usage of firearms will become suspect to a tyrannical government, and as long as the government retains support (necessary for the prosecution of any war, much less against its own population), there will be informers ready to speak up on the matter, either by ideological leaning or by hopes of avoiding punishment themselves. This requires the storage of firearms in non-optimal conditions, as well as a high rate of equipment destruction as caches are found and seized by the tyrannical government, and almost always a crackdown on civilian suppliers of firearms in the area. In most cases, then, the source becomes an outside supplier (as in the case of gunrunning by national intelligence agencies) or the national militaries/paramilitaries themselves.