And then all you get is a whole bunch of mutually hostile regional militias sitting on piles of rubble shooting at each other. This is not a recipe for a stable state of any kind, and certainly not a democratic one. Guns and democracy simply don't mix. Democracy is about giving an equal voice to every citizen, while firearms are a force multiplier. They make the strong stronger and the weak comparatively weaker.
> This is not a recipe for a stable state of any kind
It is not meant to be used in a stable state. It’s a Hobbesian point of last resort, to be used when democracy has failed and autocracy/tyranny is in effect. It’s a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency, so to speak.
The American Revolution wasn't a citizen uprising, it was a local-government uprising it did rely on citizen militias against professional soldiers, but those citizen militias were the regular security forces of the local governments, which also the central government relied on for local security in routine cases, not counterbalances to them. That's the model the second amendment attempted to preserve, but even with the RKBA alive that model was progressively abandoned and it's last significant remnants were retired decades ago.
And even with that, the American Revolution relied on backing from one of the top two European powers at the time to succeed.
The national guard, the modern militia, can still be called out by state governors. Under the law they are controlled by the federal government, but in a dictatorship and civil war situation that might not mean much (just as how in the American civil war many members of the military resigned and fought for the southern rebels)
It’s likely any successful revolution or insurgency would have outside backing.
Vietnam was backed by the USSR, the taliban receives support from Pakistan, the insurgency in Iraq was supported by Iran, and so on.
Just like we ourselves destabilized Syria and Libya by supporting insurgencies there.
As demonstrated by the 2016 elections, there are other countries out there even now who are eager to interfere with the US.
In a theoretical future US dictatorship, perhaps support for an insurgency might come over the border from Canada and Mexico. We are dealing with a hypothetical situation far from what today’s international and national politics look like, of course.
