You ought to think about how bad every American school is at teaching and how bad every American university is at preparing and how awful every American company is at hiring and how terrible every American agency is at governing and yet despite all this we’re still #1 GDP
According to bsking, Scott Alexander has said something like "We are a nation of freaks, weirdos, and absolute lunatics and I suspect we will never fall to tyranny because of it." I can't find the exact quote, because it looks like it is behind the paywall at "Contra Hoel." Yet it sounds like him and I suspect it is largely true in any event.
I think the statements are true and largely related. This is not to discount that many sober and even boring individuals have been the backbone of American society. Yet even some of the Bagginses have a Tookish streak, and that has made all the difference. For the first statement I think the key is recognising that everyone's schools are terrible, every nation's companies and agencies are foolish, but only in America do we dare to say it out loud. Finns tell you how wonderful their schools are as do Romanians and South Koreans. Across Latin America people will tell you that their local economies are kinder, protecting the dear old street sellers of corn tortillas or the fishermen. And they are still poor.
Going further afield and relating it to resisting tyranny, it is not just armed resistance in some coordinated fashion that is the difficulty for tyrants. The wags and comedians who point out that a bunch of hillbillies have no chance of taking out a single military base are missing the point. It is the uncooperativeness, the constant nagging frustration of officials who can't get people to even stand in line properly or fill out Necessary Forms. We are cranks, we wear them down until it's just not worth the candle to make us behave. This is true of the guns as well. Americans don't have any chance of holding a crossroads near Camp Lejeune for even an afternoon, certainly. Marines out on leave would handle that without even calling back to base. But if you want to know why owning guns has a lot to do with resisting tyranny, imagine going house-to-house to confiscate them in Baltimore, Burbank, and Billings. Good luck finding people who want that job.