Is granpaw's shotgun really going to prevent the government from enforcing a law someone doesn't like? Highly doubtful. Police are likely going to be more heavily armed than a random citizen, and if not, the military definitely will be. An armed population is not going to be effective against a professional force. What an armed population does seem to be good at is: hunting and sport, but also domestic violence, mass shootings, school shootings, road rage shootings, and so on...
The idea, presumably, is not that an armed populace would win an all-out battle against the government in which the people fighting on behalf of the government are fully motivated and committed.
A bee does not expect to kill a dog(or whatever) with its stinger. It is a deterrent.
Now, I'm not saying that it is necessarily worth it for the population to be armed in this way. I don't know whether it is worth it. Maybe not? But the question is more complicated than "well obviously the government is going to be more armed, and therefore there is no point." .
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
While sieges haven't ended favorably throughout American history, the threat used to be explosives/IEDs and domestic terrorism.
The ATF did a decent job of policing this but now the threat is shifting to insider threats and insurrection (something we're terrible at policing). When you can't beat the adversary in conventional warfare, you turn to psyops to use the adversary's own weapons against them.
If the military gets called to your ranch, there's no guaranteeing whose side they'll fight on. You may start with plastic AR-15s...until sympathizers toss you the keys to the Abrams.
And a lot of them won't care what the government does as long as it doesn't touch their guns. Hell, a lot of them will probably take the government's side in the revolution, depending on who's in office and who they're oppressing.
Some of the strongest gun control laws in the country (Mulford Act) were made not because of a liberal idealism against firearm violence but rather as a direct reaction to the Black Panthers doing armed patrols of police and community watch under a republican state government.
I predict you'll see more of this as more minorities lean deeper left and the culture war types start blowing gaskets about armed antifa whatevers.
