[Deathmonger]

Your intuition is correct--only Saddam's Baath party members are allowed to be armed. If everyone in Iraq was armed, there would not be a Saddam anymore.

[Blue Collar Christian]

That's not necessarily true. Most US of Americans are armed or could be in short order, but even here it would have been difficult to impossible to organize enough people together to run off the Clinton Administration and the Anti-gun members of Congress without a government sponsored crackdown resulting in the deaths or imprisonment of the chain of command. However, we still have somewhat open elections that are in essence, peaceful coups.