A government program to arm everyone
Megan Mcardle asks, "if guns are widely available in Iraq, how come they've got this nasty dictatorship?" Please read her post and the comments.

• Civil arms are necessary, but not sufficient, for liberty. Megan and commenters conclude that people have to believe that armed struggle will have a chance to succeed before they'll try it.
  
• What constitutes "widespread" gun ownership is in the eye of the beholder. I don't agree that it's impossible to quantify gun ownership in Iraq in a meaningful comparison with that in the US or elsewhere. Of course, the news coverage of Iraqi gun ownership does not attempt honest quantification.
  
• Clearly the falling regime made sure that its friends had more, or better; this regime was also expert at knowing who its friends, enemies, and even fence-sitters, were. And where they were, and what they were saying.
  

Please keep coming back to this: it did work the one time we tried it. We are as sure as we can be in retrospect that had we not been armed competitively with our rulers, we would not have achieved independence.

Iraq's experience does not disprove that assertion, nor those of the disarmament lobby.

Break break . . .

The United Nations has drafted a confidential blueprint for administering [post-Saddam] Iraq.

One more reason, if more were needed, to not allow the United Nations to administer Iraq after Saddam's fall: what civilian gun ownership exists there today surely would end.