It's a fantasy Americans seem to uniquely believe in that arming the populace is a good deterrent against bad government policy.
If it actually worked, one would expect the US to be two separate nations now. After all, what was the Civil War if not a mass of Americans deciding extra-legally that the laws should not apply to them and taking up arms to break free of government oppression and form a government more inclined to protect their freedoms?
And yet, after a bloody conflict that claimed more American lives than World War II, the country is still one nation and Americans still cling to a strange belief that private gun ownership protects against tyranny (as if a tyrant wouldn't bring their own guns to bear against the citizenry, like Sherman burning towns south of the Mason-Dixon to hamstring the morale of the rebels).
It's not perfect. But what it means is that if you're going to impose a policy that unpopular on half the population, you may have to go as far as the Civil War did, including accepting that many of your own people dying. That's... somewhat daunting.
And a tyrant, while perfectly willing to bring their own guns to turn on citizens, would have a military that might not be willing, especially if they didn't agree with the tyrant. (The Civil War wasn't just the US army against the citizens of the south. It was the army members from the south against the army members from the north.)
It's far from perfect. It demands a tax in blood during peacetime as a faulty guard against tyranny in time of civil war (to say nothing of the fact that---as the Civil War indicates---there's no particular guarantee that the armed civilians will be defending particularly virtuous rights against government interference; it was, after all, the state's rights to nullify laws curtailing slavery that was the crux of the conflict).
If it actually worked, one would expect the US to be two separate nations now. After all, what was the Civil War if not a mass of Americans deciding extra-legally that the laws should not apply to them and taking up arms to break free of government oppression and form a government more inclined to protect their freedoms?
And yet, after a bloody conflict that claimed more American lives than World War II, the country is still one nation and Americans still cling to a strange belief that private gun ownership protects against tyranny (as if a tyrant wouldn't bring their own guns to bear against the citizenry, like Sherman burning towns south of the Mason-Dixon to hamstring the morale of the rebels).