Waco was the FEDGOV against a small church...what Bill Maher needs to think about is whether that same force could have won against every household in Texas.
I think the answer becomes obvious to even the most casual observer. There are less than 25,000 police officers in the entire state of Texas. Add another 30,000 Fed LEO’s if you like. There are over 25,000,0000 people in the great State of Texas (mostly armed to the teeth).
If it ever came down to it, they wouldn’t amount to a fart in the wind against those odds. Now if nobody was armed and they had to throw rocks instead, it would be an entirely different story. A seven year old can see that. I am pretty sure Bill Maher can too if he is honest about it.
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 Solzhenitsyn