Responding to this implied question, a slashdotter wrote:
"Actually, power lies with guns (as it always has), whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive that it is the Duty of the People to alter or abolish it."

Someone replied by saying:
You're an idiot, and this is just an assaninely stupid statement.

What you seem to have missed out on is that in 1776, the guns the populace had and the guns the government had were the same, so the side that won was pretty much based on how many people you had, influenced by your ability to pay them, and their emotional/economic investment in the fight.

In modern day resistence, guns are so useless that they're only used against extremely poor governments. You might be able to stage a revolution in the Congo with guns, hell, you can even do it with enough people and some machetes, but there is just no way that you can keep a government like the US government honest with the treat of a firearm. The government is not threatened by a firearm - it is useless against their tank, and it is especially useless after the government has blown up your car.

Iraqi insurgents have guns. IRA had guns. Hamas has guns. What do these groups do with guns? They try to AVOID using them, because when they make use guns they are visible, and when they are visible people can drop a bomb on them. A gun is useless when your enemy is just going to send a missile into your apartment if they know where you are. They know that guns don't work, which is why they use bombs. Look at the number of Americans killed in Iraq by IED vs. firearm.

Even with bombs, you're not going to get what you want; all you succeed at doing is creating an environment of poor security, which leads to a poor economy. Even in a poor economy, the government is still better off than the populace. Once you've let the government get out of hand, it's too late: The best you can do is make your economy so bad that your government becomes militarily weak enough that they provoke someone to come and invade you.

There's a name for places like that: Bosnia.

A third poster agreed with the second opinion:
You're right. Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan had guns and, by golly, the bravest men any battlefield might've seen. What happened to them? B-52s flying in round-the-world-trips carpet-bombed them and their entire camp areas into oblivion. What remained of them wherever they were encountered in skirmishes were within hours of battle starting anihilated by rockets coming from submarines emerging thousands of miles away in the middle of the ocean and then submerging again. How can you fight that?!

If Al-Qaeda fighters, tough, hardened, passionate and insane, couldn't do it, then I very much doubt an American civil movement could; Americans were reared on an everyman-for-himself capitalist culture, and good luck to anyone who may try to summon in them the sort of passion, irrational dedication and resolve required for a revolution. You can't even convince Americans to care enough about their fellow citizens to adopt universal healthcare, let alone a revolution.

And if anyone thinks the US government won't use violence to suppress internal dissent, then look back at what they did to the leftist movements of the 1960s, they broke their back, they used live amunition on campus grounds to shoot demonstrators.

What is your opinion? Does political power lie with the people, or does it lie with whoever has the greatest amount of military power, be it guns or bombs? Will democratic governments unleash terror on the people they are supposed to be representing if there's any form of mass uprising against them? Who is really in charge of us?