But the situation in China suggests that what autocrats actually fear isn't so much people with guns as citizens armed with information and social media accounts).
Ridge said that he hoped the Ready.gov campaign would be received with less skepticism than the suggestion, several months ago, that citizens arm themselves with duct tape.
But other parts – particularly the regulation of gun sales – have to be national to protect the places that choose not to have their citizens armed to the teeth.
A street of shuttered shops, locked playgrounds and closed clinics, a street patrolled by citizens armed with knives and bats, is not a place to build a life.
The people voted him use of a bodyguard of citizens armed with clubs, with the aid of which he seized the Acropolis and held power briefly in 560/559.
The ranks of news gatherers now include not only newsroom staffers but also freelancers, university faculty and students, bloggers and citizens armed with smart phones.
It was a small victory in the fight against electoral malfeasance in Russia, one that has underscored the increasing potency of a new kind of election monitor here: common citizens armed with smartphones, digital recorders and cameras.
"I thought, Whoa, they don't really understand the relationship of the press to candidates," Fowler said, expressing a sentiment that some of the candidates' staffers may feel about the proliferation of uncredentialled citizens armed with digital recorders.
Contrary to all rational expectations, a group of citizens armed with not much more than sticks and shields made of cardboard boxes and metal garbage-can lids overwhelmed a police force firing live ammunition.
The world has been watching this struggle between a tenacious, brutal and corrupt government, using all the apparatus of the state, and a great and varied body of citizens, armed with nothing but words and music and legitimacy and hope.
