One of the key defenses for the idea of citizens being able to own firearms is the assumption that this provides some sort of built-in defense mechanism against tyranny. This is often scoffed at by the “anti-gun crowd” as some sort of silly abstract “strawman” example that will never actually happen. They see the picture of this rise of tyranny as a unrealistic power fantasy for men who wear red baseball hats. However, the War in Ukraine including the period from the start of the Maidan Revolution has provided real life 21^st century examples, all caught on video and posted to social media, of what real tyranny looks like and the great cost of having a mostly unarmed populace.

The Maidan Revolution itself was the violent overthrow of the democratically elected although extremely unpopular and ineffective Yanukovich presidency.  Certain forces organized 40,000 men to rise up in protest. Long story short, thousands of armed “activists” decided the fate of a country with a population of 40,000,000 at the time. This leads to point number one – if one group of people has weapons and the other does not, guess who will eventually dominate whom?

During this revolutionary period many Anti-Maidan Ukrainian citizens began to protest in response. This was especially true in the south and east of the country. The most vivid protest, and a huge spark that later lit the fires of war in 2022 was the burning of the “House of Unions” in Odessa on May 2^nd, 2014. Anti-Maidan activists had seized this building more of less peacefully, only to be locked inside and burnt to death by various Neo-Nazis and Banderites of one flavor or another. Later, in response to similar but more effective mostly peaceful uprisings out east, the authorities in Kiev started their “Anti Terrorist Operation”. This military campaign was to subjugate, ironically through terror, the areas in and around the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.

The first tanks from Kiev soon arrived on the horizon in the Donbass. Many people went empty handed to stand in front of the war machines as a form of non-violent resistance only to be slaughtered. Pacifism doesn’t work against an enemy with a fascistic ideology that takes great joy in seeing you die. Kiev essentially launched a war against half or more of the population of the country for being disloyal untermenshchen. This leads to point number two – in a European country in the 21^st century non-violent protestors were massacred en mass AND their government consciously waged war against its own citizenry. Non-violent resistance became a death sentence.

After this point both before and after the start of the SMO we can hear many tales of the torture of locals in basements and the ethnic cleansing of apartment buildings. Kiev’s forces went door-to-door massacring everyone with no exception just like the Nazis did during WWII. Although America’s oceans are its best defense against a traditional invasion, many remark how the Japanese feared having to fight “an (armed) American behind every tree”. This could be an apocryphal tale, but it validates point three – if the citizenry of the Donbass had been armed en masse, it would have made ethnic cleansing a costly, slow and perhaps impossible task. Due to a lack of arms, the common man was forced to wait for Moscow or rely on the mercy of Fascists both local and foreign. If there would have been a Russian speaker with a rifle behind every tree… or in every soviet apartment hall way, the acts of genocide that lead to the war could have been ground to a halt or come at a high cost to the perpetrators forcing them to at best just bomb civilians in a far less personal way of war.

Video-after-video of men being forcibly drafted into the Ukrainian armed forces are in the tens of thousands on social media. For the crime of essentially being male and not of privilege, these men are beaten and thrown into vans to be given minimal training then sent to the front as cannon fodder. On the Russian side recruitment goals are met thanks to signing bonuses, a cultural attitude towards war and most importantly – being on the right side of history. If the men across Ukraine, who are day-in-and-day-out being sent to probable death on the front, all had a rifle at home it would become far more difficult to enact mass abductions of local guys across the country. In fact there is some level of real violent resistance to this phenomenon but it is nothing to the extent of every man having a Kalashnikov at home. And here we have point four – we can see that against a complete violation of human rights and “being on the wrong side of history” where many are forced to die in the quest to crush their own (Russian) culture, being armed is the different between life and death on the front or at the hands of your local commissars.

When the government is on the right side of history, or even if it is just passively on the wrong side of it then the “normies”, even if they do possess weapons, will generally go with the flow and toil away their lives in fields and factories. In Russia proper something like less than 0.01% of legally owned guns are used in crimes. Even in “gun nuts” america the amount of deaths from guns is a tiny drop in the bucket. Normies rarely misuse their weapons, they will just sit there or be used to destroy tin cans.

But when a government becomes truly evil, as it just did in a European country in the 21^st century, the only means of true resistance is an armed populace. No one can create a 100% anti-tyranny system, but having an armed population certainly grinds away at the problem, slowing it down and making these types of repression truly costly for the traitors in the capital. The events from the Maidan to present are proof that the Founding Fathers of the United States of America were absolutely correct that the “right to bear arms” is a guarantor of freedom against excessive use of authority.

To put this in a Russian context, it is as Alexander Nevsky said “he comes with a sword shall die by the sword” but what happens when the masses are swordless?