Gun Control in Counterinsurgency

[Dayuhan]

My choices are four: (1) stick with the government; (2) join the insurgency; (3) start a "third way" movement; or (4) leave the country. I posit that I stick with choice 1.

Not specifically relevant, but a further option, often adopted in such situations, would be to stay nominally with the government and hedge your bets by maintaining a functional relationship with the other players. The balance point of that strategy would depend on your personal assessment of probable outcomes and your personal likelihood of being hung from a lamp post if the other guys win.

Among the many things I'd want to do in the district would be a census and dossier on each household, which would include, as only a part of the whole, a registry of all items that could be used as weapons against me and mine (e.g., firearms), or manufactured into weapons against me and mine (e.g., nitrogen compounds - e.g., fertilizer - easily converted to explosives and with some other simple household items and homemade components - e.g., into remote-controlled IEDs).

Short of kicking down doors and ransacking homes, which will only benefit your enemy, how do you achieve that goal? If your district has recently been in a state of insurgency with active conflict, it's likely that much of the populace will distrust or actively dislike government, and will see a registry of weapons as a likely prelude to confiscation. They aren't going to voluntarily reveal their armaments to a potential enemy. Seems to me that in practical terms the outcome of what you suggest would be a whole lot of weapons being carefully hidden away.

The discussion needs to keep in mind that self defense or security may not be the only reason or even the primary reason behind a desire to acquire and retain armaments. In many cultures a man without a weapon isn't quite a man, and people in these cultures will violently resist disarmament initiatives even if they face no immediate threat that requires them to be armed.