This is what I posted on the reddit /guns forum when somebody said that "10,000 Egyptians with guns flooding into the main square would have been a bad thing".
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OK, here's how it works.
If you want to pull off a relatively bloodless revolution patterned on what happened in Tunisia, you need to get the cops and/or the military on your side.
SHOOTING those same cops/soldiers is counter-productive if that's your goal. So yes, the original poster is correct: 10,000 armed Egyptians in Tahrir Square would have done more harm than good.
But that doesn't mean there isn't a role for guns!!!
See, a dictator like Murabak has a problem: not enough psychopaths to go around. He needs total psychos to do the "secret police" crap - the midnight arrests, torture sessions, body dumping, etc. So the usual pattern is, he'll pile up those sorts in a small number of organizations, sometimes as little as one org. This model was adopted by Nazi Germany: you had the SS doing the really horrible **** as opposed to the regular German military and even most German cops who usually despised what the SS were up to.
The pattern was actually perfected by the Tsars in Russia prior to the commies taking over.
So what does this mean?
Well when you're out doing the mass demonstrations, you don't want guns around so long as things haven't gone all the way to a civil war.
Where you DO want guns is at the small organizing meetings for the protests "behind the scenes" where you have to fear raids by the real psycho-organization(s). THOSE bastards need shooting!
The US civil rights movement was no different. Esp. early on when Dr. King wasn't a major figure that couldn't be taken out without a major backlash, his home and various meeting places were armed camps ready to fend off midnight KKK raids. Out on the streets waving signs or doing sit-ins or whatever, no, that's the time for unarmed resistance.
The other time guns come in handy is when leaders or organizers are quietly on the move. The "Mississippi Burning" murders happened in 1964 when a single carload of voter registration workers were ambushed and killed with the cooperation of local cops. After that, a lot of those voter registration workers went armed and some Klan died too out in the back roads where the gruntwork of civil rights reform was happening.
Now...I'm uniquely qualified to discuss this. I'm a former lobbyist (2003-2005) for a smaller "NRA similar" org, yet I've also been arrested and spent 18 hours in the San Diego County jail for an unarmed protest against illegal voting system secrecy by that county - an unarmed protest taken straight out of Dr. King's playbook. But if somebody from Diebold or the like ever wanted to take me out, well they COULD, sure, but not quietly. Not at ALL quietly - I can make damned sure of that. Full-house 357Mag is anything but quiet.
Upshot: Non-violent protest is strongly preferred over an all-out civil war by anyone sane, but at the same time organizers of protests can and have been subject to criminal assassination - and have an absolute personal civil right to self defense under such circumstances. And it works because regimes don't have a hell of a lot of real psychos to threaten you with.
Jim March
Member of the Board of Directors, BlackBoxVoting.org (I'm one of Bev Harris' "lieutenants")
2nd Vice Chair, Pima County Libertarian Party