I still think this is a fallacy. Most people are willing sheep in a system where they can be controlled and manipulated. It will never come to the last ditch deterrent.

A great example was the Nazi propaganda machine. During the Nuremberg Trials, Gustave Gilbert the American psychologist, talked to many high ranking Nazi's including Hermann Göring. In his Nuremberg Diaries, he outlines a conversation with Göring, that shows just how any population can be propelled to accept almost anything as long as they perceive that their own freedom and well-being is under threat.

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

This last comment is so apt to the world we live in today. The war against terrorism. The militarisation of our police forces.

If you take this further, the 2nd Amendment, regardless of the actual threat of an abusive government, can easily be neutralised by effective propaganda.

Joseph Goebbels said much the same:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

He also said this about the press:

"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play."

The Nazis enabled an entire nation, with but a handful of dissenters, to go to war with the rest of Europe. At the time the German public believed that they were doing the right thing to protect their own sovereignty, however warped those reasons might seem today.

The thought that the American public could ever be persuaded to rise up against their own government, with the vast array of tools that they (the government) currently wield, is a false hope (in my opinion).