Even if it's a rhetorical question, I'd like to answer it. I wouldn't see it as putting my life on the line for someone else so much as dying for my own dignity, motivated by white-hot hatred for those who would rob me of that dignity. If someday I'm presented with a choice between total subjugation and death, then I'll choose death. But before dying I will make the JBTs pay a high price.
This isn't about me trying to be a tough guy, because that's not how I see myself. I simply find the idea of utter domination by other mortal men to be much more horrifying than death (which is inevitable in any case).
It would be entirely acceptable to me to go this route alone. But if lots of other people did the same thing, the JBTs might start to think twice about what they were doing.
Most Americans are as you describe, but there are enough exceptions to make defeatism unjustified. Even if only 1% of the country resisted in a scenario such as wholesale gun confiscation, you're talking about three million people spread across the country. There is no way that many armed people could be defeated. The difficulty and expense of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq would be utterly trivial in comparison.
