system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: private gun ownership is useless against government tyranny

I will freely admit to being a liberal in favor of gun control. But my fiancé is a single issue voter about gun rights. Gun rights outrank every other issue to him and his friends, and I'd like to understand where they come from before we marry.

I asked them why private gun ownership ranks so highly in importance to them, and they all said it's because an armed population will be able to overthrow a tyrannical government if it becomes necessary. They also cared about self-defense, but overthrowing a tyrannical government was the main reason. They cite the Revolutionary War as an example.

In my view, a modern armed population will never be able to win against the current US military. Civilians don't have Apache helicopters. Almost everyone I know can't run 5 miles straight. At best, it'd be years of bloody civil war like Syria's and they still wouldn't win. 

As the years go by, military technology will only continue to outpace the tech available to civilians and this rationale will become more and more far-fetched. I just don't see how private gun ownership would allow us to overthrow the government at any point in the future. 

The whole argument seems like a theoretical exercise that shouldn't be the foremost political issue to anyone. I hope to understand opposing viewpoints.

EDIT: Alright everyone I'm disabling inbox replies and taking off. My mind was changed on some possibilities of successfully overthrowing government using the military itself, but not without it. Enjoy the rest of the discussion!
gpt
>I just don't see how private gun ownership would allow us to overthrow the government at any point in the future.

Why didn't we win in Iraq and Afghanistan, then?

A tyrannical government is one that does not operate under the consent of the governed, and must do so by force. The only way to do so is continuous occupation of the territory to maintain control over the local governmental institutions (otherwise, it's not really in control). 

Armed citizens are going to avoid going toe to toe with the actual military in the same way that insurgents in the middle east currently do. You don't engage them in battle, you hide among the populace and take pot shots at them, then disappear into the crowd.

The victory condition for an insurgency against a tyrannical government is not defeating the government in battle, it wins by causing the tyrannical government to expend so many resources dealing with the insurgency that it either gives up for lack of will, collapses in debt, or a military coup decides that they'd rather stop being shot at by their countrymen and turns on the formal leadership.