Vern, you missed my point - communists in Eastern Europe never fully disarmed people - hunting rifles and shotguns were never seized for example. Before 1989 the population in Bulgaria was about 7 million people and about 50 - 60 000 of them were hunters (I don't know the exact numbers). That is a really impressive number for an army, don't you think? The situation in other communist countries was the same. And yet we don't have any really successful resistance movement in those countries - a one that truly succeeded. Dictators don't really need to disarm people, only to eliminate their leaders.
Boris