Trying to guard against tyranny by increasing private gun ownership is dumb, because you are simply creating another group of people that would-be tyrants can use to gain and retain power.
Is there any example of a widely armed society that nevertheless succumbed to classical authoritarianism from the inside?
AFAIK even the European societies that have a lot of guns in hands of civilians (hunting or others), such as the Swiss or Scandinavians, are mostly fairly free long-term.
They could be conquered by much stronger external foes such as the Nazis, but the theory that those guns would be a boon to a would-be internal tyrant does not seem to be borne out.
>Is there any example of a widely armed society that nevertheless succumbed to classical authoritarianism from the inside?
Plenty. The population of the Weimar Republic was pretty militarized (lots of WWI veterans with combat experience and plenty of activity of "Freikorps" militia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freikorps#Freikorps_involvemen...). These militant and armed forces largely threw in with the Nazi political movement and contributed to the collapse of the first German democracy and the institutionalization of the Nazi Reich. Just to make one very obvious example.
Is there any example of a widely armed society that nevertheless succumbed to classical authoritarianism from the inside?
AFAIK even the European societies that have a lot of guns in hands of civilians (hunting or others), such as the Swiss or Scandinavians, are mostly fairly free long-term.
They could be conquered by much stronger external foes such as the Nazis, but the theory that those guns would be a boon to a would-be internal tyrant does not seem to be borne out.