zlacker

Orwell, writing about the Spanish civil war, gives the release of arms stockpiles to trade union militias as a key factor in the early fighting against Franco. That war saw a combination of foreign intervention, plus soldiers and police choosing either side, but militias still played a crucial role.

It's not clear whether arms stockpiles would have the same impact on a modern war, but they might.

>>strken+(OP)
Maybe a counterexample, but it's also a really weird situation. The arms in that case were seized from government arsenals (that's how I'm taking "public arsenals", evidently under the authority of the government pre-seizure, anyway), and the whole thing was a reaction to a very recent military coup, plus the elected government was still kinda trying to resist Franco and the army at that point. At any rate, the rebels here were the military faction under Franco. Plus the scrappy resistance using looted public arms lost :-(