At any given time there were only about 250 active IRA members fighting off the Ulster Defence League and holding down the British army.BTW their favorite weapon was an Armalite... I don’t know which caliber.
Therefore, what could 10, 20, 40 or 60 MILLION do arrayed against 1 or 2 million? It would be as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote: “During an arrest, you think since you are not guilty, how can they arrest you? Why should you run away? And how can you resist right then? After all, you’ll only make your situation worse; you will make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake.
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family?
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! We did not love freedom enough. Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.”
Even a few hundred people armed only with .22LR rifles and pistols could cause major havoc in an area. Look at the two DC snipers some time back. They had a major city and suburbs paralyzed with fear.