> Or I don't care about freedom to bear arms because I don't have a gun
You're doing it wrong. If you want to paraphrase one of the two affirmations in that quote, you need to write something like: "Or I don't care about freedom to bear arms because I don't have anything to shoot at".
The second part of that structure is showing a use case for that freedom (speaking, publishing, shooting). Simple possession is not enough.
So concentrate more the next time you feel like entertaining this fantasy that civilians need to be able to freely shoot at stuff, just like they need to freely speak and publish.
"I don't care about the freedom to bear arms because I have nothing to protect"
I agree that fending off a modern army with rifles is a pipe dream which causes political blindness (although this disparity just illustrates how thoroughly the second amendment has already been trampled). But there are plenty of smaller scale immediate situations where one might really wish they had a gun - eg bears while camping.
Also the whole premise around these sayings is ultimately flawed. When we are forced into coming up with justifications for natural rights (thought, communication, using tools, being left alone, etc), we're fighting a losing war.
My version of "fending off" includes an end goal where you're no longer under attack and don't have to hide out in caves.
Guerrilla campaigns work because they're driving less-committed foreign invaders out through attrition. Our domestic military has nowhere else to withdraw to, and would necessarily have broken free of public opinion (otherwise democracy would put a stop to anything long before sustained conflict).
Don't get me wrong, if any such thing occurs I would much rather have distributed gun ownership than not. Furthermore, the right to bear arms quite obviously covers conventional explosives, armored vehicles, and missiles. To the extent that this might not be good policy, then the second amendment should have been rewritten rather than simply trampled.
On the political front, it frustrates me to see the amount of energy shoehorned into "they're gonna take our guns", which imho causes people to be myopic to the other rights that are being oppressed. I'm not talking about commenters in this thread (who obviously have more than one issue in their head at once), but your less-connected punter who turns on talk radio and has their specific desire for freedom transmuted into support for a different flavor of tyranny.
This has been perhaps the most interesting thing, from a military tactics view, of the latest wars. That a moderately armed insurgency can hold against a very sophisticated military. The limits of smart weapons. In many ways it bolsters the argument that the 2nd amendment, as a bulwark against the emergence of a federal police state, is not actually outdated.
From a capabilities standpoint, the latest wars have the very sophisticated armies showing an awful lot of self restraint.
Another way of putting it is that the longevity of the insurgents probably says more about the mission that was handed to the military than it does about the ability of the military to deal with the tactics.
> In the border region with Pakistan, the mujahideen would often launch 800 rockets per day. Between April 1985 and January 1987, they carried out over 23,500 shelling attacks on government targets.
I would say that compared to the Soviets the Mujahideen were only moderately armed. Even more so the Taliban vs the US in the border regions of Pakistan.
You're doing it wrong. If you want to paraphrase one of the two affirmations in that quote, you need to write something like: "Or I don't care about freedom to bear arms because I don't have anything to shoot at".
The second part of that structure is showing a use case for that freedom (speaking, publishing, shooting). Simple possession is not enough.
So concentrate more the next time you feel like entertaining this fantasy that civilians need to be able to freely shoot at stuff, just like they need to freely speak and publish.