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Not really.
Can you imagine a successful insurrection against helicopter gunships and tanks?
Think about it, the only thing we lack to suppress the ‘insurgency’ in Iraq is the will - and Iraqis have assault rifles and RPGs!
Do you think the politicritters would lack will in suppressing folks threatening their power and their lives? They’d do Ruby Ridge and Waco ten thousand times over to preserver their power.

Can you imagine a successful insurrection against helicopter gunships and tanks?...Do you think the politicritters would lack will in suppressing folks threatening their power and their lives? They’d do Ruby Ridge and Waco ten thousand times over to preserver their power.

After the first few reruns of Ruby Ridge and Waco a lot of those helicopter gunships and tanks would show up on "our" side.

yeah. still simple. 90% of the fighting would be guerilla tactics. it won’t take too long before they have to abandon their tanks and gunships and go on foot.
besides, you don’t think a good portion of the army, faced with the order to kill, american citizens would defect and take their equipment with them? you don’t think there are veterans that are willing and able to take over the controls of any equipment out there?

Don't forget this classic:

What Good Can A Handgun Do Against An Army?

Can you imagine a successful insurrection against helicopter gunships and tanks?

While I wouldn't welcome one, yes - I could imagine it.

Tito was once asked how his partisans, armed primarily with a bunch of old rifles, could possibly fight the Germans, armed with lots of new tanks. Tito said, "When the Germans get out of their new tanks to take a piss, my partisans will shoot them with their old rifles." OK, so that's more of a flip answer to a stupid question than a well thought out strategy, but it illustrates the point that NO insurrection of average folk against an army can - or should - fight toe-to-toe with tanks, fighters, choppers, artillery, etc. Is that how the Iraqis are fighting us?

Here's something else to consider: let's say that a particular city shows a lot of resistance - what's a future tyrant going to do, level the city? Such a use of disproportionate response will backfire in public opinion, even if public opinion is carefully managed (people aren't THAT stupid).

Another thing: an insurgency doesn't have to prevail in battles to be successful. What would happen if truckers refused to go on certain roads because of the risk of having the truck hijacked or destroyed (with them inside)? How much food and fuel would reach the cities? What if gas and oil pipelines were hit?

What if certain key leaders were targeted - or their families? That'd do a lot to confuse or dishearten the enemy, and would make others less likely to want to step into their shoes or follow their orders. If the remaining leaders were greatly angered, then they'd be more likely to make stupid mistakes (most likely of the PR kind, like ordering a city to be leveled).

The point is that with 250 million guns and something like 85 million gun owners, you don't have to have a very large percentage actively fighting a tyrant in order to have a very large effect. What if only 1% fought? OK, now you have 850,000 fighters - the ones who are the most motivated, and who are probably very well equipped and with substantial resources. Quite probably a lot of ex-military would be among them, giving lots of tactical and organizational expertise to the fight. Plus, they'll be spread out all over the country, likely without any centralized leadership that could be easily knocked out or compromised in some way.

The big question mark is whether segments of the police, NG and military would obey orders to fire on fellow citizens IN LARGE-SCALE OPERATIONS. Waco and Ruby Ridge are one thing - what if several states out West told a tyrant to shove it? Is the army going to bomb and rain down arty on cities and towns? Will the army fight a mob of several hundred citizens armed with shotguns and .22s? Maybe yes, maybe no. But there will almost certainly be those in the organized forces who will either sit on their hands or actively participate in the rebellion (and maybe from the inside by passing intelligence). I can't answer those or a whole host of related questions, but it ain't going to be quite so easy. If it was so easy, then the North Vietnamese and VC would've been crushed by our 550,000 soldiers and much of our Air Force. So, too, would the Afghans have collapsed and submitted to the Soviets. It won't be so simple. Especially not when a lot of those targeted by a tyrant will have nothing to lose by fighting, and a lot of self respect, revenge and the possibility of success by fighting.

It's not a matter of how many helicopters they've got, but how many I can knock down, and that's not all as hard as some people would have you believe. Second point, you're assuming that in the event of an armed spitting match with the government, that you're going to see a straight symmetrical attrition model. It won't happen that way. Mostly counter insurgency is deploying troops to guard things while your intelligence people hopefully tell you where the insurgents are, and especially where and what their infrastructure consists of. Figure, for an effective insurgency to get going, you need around 3.5 percent of the population actively engaged in fighting back. Now, skipping the whole US population as a base, but just assuming that 3.5 percent of the estimated 260 million who own guns decide to tell the Feds to buzz off and enforce it with hot steel, that's still nine million people you've got to shove your policies down 9,100,000 people's throats. People who are inclined to resist rather than cooperate. Now assuming that Sir Robert Thompson's formula is correct, (and unlike us, he won his insurgency while we're in the process of losing two of them) you've got to have a ratio of government troops to insurgents of 7:1, which means that you've got to have 63,100,000 line troops just to guard everything, escort every convoy, defend each infrastructure target that might be hit, and if you add in the logistical requirements of that, you get a military that's larger than the current US population. And going after guerilla infrastructure ain't easy. For that matter, consider the fact that the last couple of terrorist incidents that surfaced, were discovered by accident, not by the excellence of our counterintelligence people. Doesn't sound promising, does it? And when you consider the economic impacts of having a war of this type engaging even a fraction of those numbers, you get a broken economy fast, instead of slowly, because we've outsourced our wealth creating sector while assuming that we can run an economy based on two kids flipping patties at McDonalds and selling em to each other. We're seriously in hock up to our eyeballs as it is, and in need of a schnorkle, and Bush persists in trying to do what LBJ did which was to run a guns & butter economy. He nearly wrecked it, which is one reason why Nixon and Kissenger had to find a figleaf and let North Vietnam and their Soviet patrons win-- we were broke which is what led to Ford and Carter's stagflation and the depression that characterized the first part of Reagan's first term. So, the bottom line here is that if the Feds want to rekindle the Cold Civil War that lasted from 1988 to 2000, or because the Patriot Act eliminates the wiggle room that both sides had during that war, so that it becomes a hot one, the end result is that the US is going to collapse rather quickly due to capital exhaustion-- just like the Soviet Union. Figure, the Chinese own a huge amount of our debt, and around 27 percent of statutory Federal outlays are on borrowed money. We've outsourced our manufacturing, which means that the wealth production sector is nearly gone, and governments have to tax wealth in order to pay off borrowed money. So do the Feds want to get in any deeper? Only if they're suicide prone and while I tend to think that the lot of them are a pack of creeps and weirdos, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're anywhere near as stupid as that manouver has gotta be. So except for professional haters like Carolyn McCarthy and Frank Lautenburg, who do you think besides the people at BATFE who'd want to take a risk on state terror causing a cold civil war and more likely a hot one, over the gun issue? Funny, but I've got ten perfectly good fingers and they're useless in this situation, because I can't think of anybody that stupid right off hand. (And I'm sure that if there is somebody, I'll be corrected. ) The last time we had one of these, the Eastern Nomenklatura had to essentially allow for a Nixonian solution by eliminating a big part of the causus belli-- they let the Assault Weapons Ban mostly, but not completely lapse. (Section 922R is still enabled by Bush I's original Executive Order. That's stupid, but then again, the people in this Administration don't exactly impress me as a group of people who learn from touching a hot griddle, not to put their hands on it and press down. Bottom Line? Only an idiot would push a gun control package that would resurrect the Cold Civil War. And hopefully there are still enough adults around who while they might not like us gun owners, they do like their Iron Ricebowl and therefore do what they can to sit on the Lemming Wing of the Republican and Democratic Parties, in order to preven them from losing something they prize a lot more than screwing with people like me.