> You say they are different, but you don’t say why.

Sorry, didn't occur to me to note the differences. The incentives, motivations, goals, costs, and resources for a foreign government fighting on your soil are all very from your own government fighting a civil war or dealing with a domestic, guerrilla resistance, are the main things.

I remain unconvinced that private arms are likely to be any kind of useful factor in resisting tyranny in a developed country, and also unconvinced that they're more likely to be used to that end than in service of the precisely the opposite purpose, even if they were useful for tyranny-resistance to begin with.

> The incentives, motivations, goals, costs, and resources for a foreign government fighting on your soil are all very different…

That really doesn’t explain anything at all. It’s another way of saying they aren’t the same in various ways.

> also unconvinced that they're more likely to be used to that end than in service of the precisely the opposite purpose

This is an interesting political idea that bears a lot more elaboration, but seems unconnected in principle to the other point.

> It’s another way of saying they aren’t the same in various ways.

Yes, I guess I just... figured it was extremely obvious that a foreign occupation resisted by locals and a civil war or domestic insurgency are very different, largely on those categories. I feel like I'm being asked to defend the statement that bicycles and airplanes are, though both modes of transportation, quite different in a bunch of important ways.

It’s obvious they are different. It’s not obvious what differences would render guns useless, which appears to be your position.

I’m not asking you to arbitrarily explain how they are different. I’m asking you to explain how and why the differences you are thinking of make guns useless for civilians to own.

Ah, I've got you. Sorry, I probably read poorly or something.

Aggregating the differences, part of it is that the stakes are so much lower in a foreign occupation and that withdrawal to save any of several sorts of costs involved is an option that won't result in the toppling of the occupying state's government or loss of any of the occupying state's core territory or sovereignty, and the other part (also mentioned in my post) is that it's very common for a successful insurgency or rebellion [edit: against foreign occupiers, I mean, in this case] to have foreign aid, which often exceeds the benefit of private arms to such a degree that it's not clear a few folks having AKs mattered at all, so even in such cases–which are already quite different from a domestic conflict—it's usually not clear-cut that private arms made much difference.

It'd help for the analysis if a state with a modern maneuver-focus equipped-and-trained army had faced a realistic domestic threat from rebels bearing private small arms... like, ever. There've been revolutions in such states (Russia, mainly—I'm actually struggling to think of another, since even the ones with maneuver-focus equipment usually hadn't managed the training for it, so fight very differently), but they've not really been the result of civil wars or armed insurrections. Such militaries have lost abroad, but not domestically, and usually against an enemy with one or more foreign state backers—and not by actual, outright defeat on the battlefield, but by convincing the occupier (the political leadership, not the military—they're usually not routes due to loss of morale) to cut their losses and go home. I strongly suspect that the circumstances that would render private arms enough to be any meaningful part of successful resistance against such a state in a civil war or insurrection, would also mean they weren't necessary for that success in the first place—that is, the circumstances would include such overwhelming and enthusiastic support from the populace, and/or enough support from the military, that a bunch of civilian-owned rifles wouldn't much matter for the outcome. There may be some narrow, unlikely set of circumstances in which they're really be the deciding factor, but at that point the cost/risk of keeping them around would have to be incredibly low to justify doing so specifically on the grounds that they're very important for resisting tyranny (there are other justifications for firearms ownership, of course).

I don’t see the explanation here.

You seem to be restating your position a few times in more words - I.e. that examples of resistance to foreign opposition are not relevant, and that guns wouldn’t be relevant in then scenarios you can imagine.

Can you try condensing the actual argument into a short paragraph?

It’s not clear what scenario you are imagining in which the weapons wouldn’t help. How about just outlining the scenario you are thinking about clearly?

You should condense this so it’s easier to read.

Your argument is that during an occupation civilians owning guns already in the occupied country doesn’t matter because another country will come in and arm them?