That brings me to a point that I was considering starting a thread for, and maybe it deserves it's own topic, but I'll mention it here.
Actually that has been the focus of a couple of very good recent threads.
People commonly say that the 2nd amendment would make it nearly impossible for a foreign army to invade and hold territory. But in countries where nearly every household has at least one gun, and rifles at that, it doesn't seem to help them much when we invade them. Do people in third world countries not practice?
Several answer to that one. For one, NO, poor rural folks in Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., do no go hit the range and blow through ammo the way us "rich" Americans can afford to. Neither can some minute percentage of them afford the kind of dedicated training and shooting competition practice that some minute portion of us "rich" Americans choose to do for recreation.
HOWEVER, that doesn't matter terribly much. The bigger issue is a disorganized, scattered, technology-less, relatively communications-less, poor, fairly immobile populace (generally representing less than the population of one of our states) facing, largely unawares, a modern mechanized and massively air-supported military force with a level of training and organization unprecidented in the history of the world.
Now, that's not to say that the American citizenry would fare a whole lot better were we to be attacked, undefended, by the equivalent force of our own Army and Marine Corps. Any real critical analysis will show that the armed-populace-as-last-defense is a very tenuous one, and one that would suffer far more defeat than victory, and such statements are probably not terribly realistic.
Read into some of those other threads for some reasons why it STILL MATTERS.
It seems like the defensive value of armed citizens is a little exaggerated. Back in the 80s in Afghanistan, the people fighting the Soviets were getting huge trouble from attack choppers, to say the least, until we gave them stinger missiles.
Reading the history of Afghanistan and the Mujahideen is very interesting, and terrible, and inspiring, and appalling, and... Suffice to say, the story of the Russians (or the Americans a couple decades later) invading and pacifying the region is not in any way similar to -- for example -- an account of, say, the British Army invading Virgina or New Jersey. It is more equivalent to the Kentucky National Guard suiting up to go win the hearts and minds of several warring Alien species who make their homes on and under the surface of Mars. It isn't just an enemy force to be fought, but an intensely difficult
world. It isn't ONE enemy to fight, but a series of town, city, regional, and national factions, the populations of which shift back and forth and make and break alliances, and some are on your side, sort of, today but not tomorrow, and where utterly incomprehensible ideals are sacred, while aspects of the "inherent goodness of man" are completely unknown.
Basically, there are no parallels which can be drawn that make the picture clear to a "western" thinker.