Hmm. Which private citizens in thirties germany would have had:[ul][li]Access to firearms[]The inclination to use them to kill people over political disagreements[]The organisation to get together with like-minded people, train, and organise the use of their firearms against other private citizens?[/li][/ul]
I do believe it would have been those people doing the door-kicking, not the people inside.
Private arms have also come into play in the context of labor struggles. For example, the Battle of Matewan and the subsequent Battle of Blair Mountain. The latter was a tactical defeat for the insurrectionists, but you could argue that it ultimately led to the passage of more labor-friendly laws.
Don’t forget the epic gunbattle between the strikers and the Pinks during the Homestead Strike. Although, in the end, the strike collapsed, the strikers did defeat the fucking Pinks in a major day-long battle. That POS Henry Clay Frick also got cut in a couple places and shot in a couple more, but didn’t die…more’s the pity.
In the long run, the battles at places like Homestead and Matewan, whether they were successful for the immediate participants, lead to a realization on the part of the plutocrats that it really was possible to push the proles too far.
spoke-, thanks for mentioning Matewan - I’d kept wanting to post about it in this thread, and kept forgetting about it.
I dunno about wrong, but I think we want different things from our militias. Of course they can’t stand up to a professional army. What they can do is cause the owner of that army to spend money keeping men in the field, cause damage to infrastructure supporting the army, and provide a seed for further resistance efforts.
So, sure, private arms weren’t instrumental in ending colonial rule, except to the extent that without private citizens with small arms, the later efforts wouldn’t have been as possible or effective, I don’t think.
ETA - or what Scumpup said better.