with 64 million gun owners across the US and who knows how many guns between them, it definitely is a deterrent.. taking down a foreign army is a lot different than taking down your own nation full of gun owners. obviously its very very situation dependent, but with so many gun owners, the government does have a level of fear of the people, not enough IMO, unfortunately we fear the government more than they fear us, when it should be the other way around. but with how much government and police shit on us already, if we were unarmed on top of that, we would be fucked.