It does suggest that a penurious armed force with no access to weapons is the problem. Apparently, not even the soldiers are trusted with guns by the dictatorship. The Maduro regime is starting to arm gangs as a means of checking the military. They trust gangs and thugs, but not responsible military men with guns, and seem to have disarmed them.

Venezuela crisis shaping up to be all about who has the guns

There is this dysfunctional process in which we tend to think of things being similar in foreign countries as it is here.  Nothing farther from reality. Same as with Iraqis during Desert Storm, the bulk of the Venezuelan Army is composed by young me with a less than basic training, given a uniform and told they are going to defend the country. They are officially cannon fodder and probably one 3 Gun sanctioned match could easily beat the lights out of a regular Venezuelan battalion.  The Pre-Chavez armed forces were not that good to begin with. The last war in which the Army was involved ended in 1863 and pretty much became a parade force or a coup d’état force. (Some special forces were the exception till disbanded in the early 80s)

And if you have been following this blog for any amount of time, you know the arming of gangs is not a new thing but many years old.  They have been doing whatever the want and as predicted, a lot of them are no longer paying attention to the Central government and specially Maduro since their allegiances were to Chavez.

There are Cuban trained and led military and police who are well fed and prepared to do what’s needed to maintain power. Those are the ones that everyone fear in Venezuela, but then again Cuba has not had a great record military-wise

I cannot say who has the guns or who’s going to get the troops the guns they need to defect and join the democrats.  But what this does show is that guns are important.  The soldiers are clearly afraid to defect because they don’t have arms.

It was never a question of guns. You can always get guns. The criminal element has guns via black market or other means. The question has been of killing the government thugs in or out of uniform, or better explained, the lack of testicular fortitude by the average Venezuelan.

A cursory search will give you the amount of civilians killed in the protests against the government through the years. Do you know what number is impossible to find and not because of censorship? The number of police and armed force personnel killed by the citizens who seek freedom (allegedly). Oh, you will find stories about cops, National Guardsmen and Army soldiers killed by the criminals in order to obtain their weapons, ammo and even grenades. And who knows how many rifles and other materiel has found itself going to the same criminals via bribery or plain robbery, this is a traditional thing down there that a simple regime change to Socialism did not cure.

So weapons are not the problem. Anybody can start with an ice pick and a distracted cop in a dark alley and build after that. The problem is that Venezuelans simply do not want to bloody their hands and do what’s necessary out of plain cowardice. They will chant the appropriate Peace and Love kumbayas and claim violence does not solve a thing, but they get tingles up their collective legs if somebody tweets that President Trump is about to send the Marines to take out Maduro.  They will be “brave” as long as there is somebody doing the violence, otherwise they will mumble slogans and cry for the EU, UN and OAS to do the something they are no willing to do.