The point isn't that you can win pitched battles against a professional army with all its ordinance, as a rag-tag citizens' militia with small arms. The point is that you CAN FIGHT. You can bleed them. When they come patrolling through your neighborhood, you might be able to take a couple of the fuckers with you. Hell, you might even be able to run away and do it again; they couldn't engage in endless "manhunts" for everyone who resisted them. They'd never feel safe and there could be shooters behind any window.
Of course, they COULD call in the artillery and air-support and level your neighborhood, sure. What would this get them though? Well, it would piss a lot of people off when innocents died and play into the hands of rebels. It would make a lot of the soldiers in that professional military seriously consider whether they were doing the right thing or not. Finally, it would simply kill people, and NO ONE wants to rule a nation of corpses.
The aim of a tyrant is to control, not to kill. What they want is to be able to have militarized police & gestapo point guns at people and cow them into submission to whatever dictates they want to impose. If citizens are instead waiting behind their doors and ready to shoot first when the jackbooted thugs come around, they've already failed.
So, the point is to fight. If you resist, you're not being controlled, and you're also undermining attempts to control others who can't or won't fight. Yes, you might die, of course. However, that's why Patrick Henry said what he famously said, more or less.
"As long as people can resist, they can be free, and tyrants can never succeed." When you're talking about using swords, knives and clubs against modern military weapons though, it ACTUALLY becomes pointless, because you can't bleed them at all. They'll just shoot you with beanbags, rubber, water cannons, microwave guns and other submission devices.
That's why Americans having guns is so important.
