I also think one could credibly dispute whether private firearm ownership in occupied territories or within German during the Nazi rise to power may have contributed to a stronger opposition.
Sure, but isn't that kinda like saying well if Doc Brown had made his time machine out of a bus instead of a delorean and had taken crates of ARs back to the Cheyenne we would be looking at a very different United States?
I get the points both you and
@Sytes are making, and to some extent I agree, but I think there are also a lot of negative consequences that could potentially outweigh the benefits.
As far as the Jew, WWII, etc arguments... I just have to eye roll.
Pogroms had been going on since what 1500s... 1400s. Europeans had been rounding up Jews, killing them, beating the crap out of them and putting them in ghettos for over 400 years. Ever watched Fiddler on the Roof? No one in 1936 through even maybe 1942 really even noticed what was going on... they just thought it was just another European anti-jew thing. And if we are being honest, here in the US we hated jews as well eg... KKK et al. and the idea of rounding people up and putting them in camps was not particularly abhorrent to the country in general, see native Americans, Andrew Jackson, and then more applicably the Japanese interment. Point being, if owning personal firearms and protecting yourself from malevolent state actors was actually a thing you think the Jews would have figured that out after 400 years of violence against them... which I guess is why we have Israel and it's current level of military expenditure per capita.
Further leading to the eye roll about Vichy France et al. is the fact that a decent portion of US R and D during the war went to trying to figure out how to mass produce weapons that the resistance could even use... eg M3 sub. Thinking about the cases of successful guerrilla resistance, Vietnam, Afghanistan (Russian war), etc. The reason they worked is because a state actor was providing arms to private citizens.
There are a ton of gun experts on here, throw down some knowledge. 1935-1937 what was even available, it would have to be European made, the production company would have to be private and not state owned, and the cost would have to be at a price point that a private citizen could actually afford to buy one. The StG 44 hadn't been invented, the 1911/thompson weren't available to the European market... I don't the french were getting a sears and roebuck catalogue, if those weapons were even sold by sears. So essentially you are looking at shotguns, hunting rifles... and then maybe some MP18s or Darnes... possible at FM24, but those were produced in the thousands not the millions and I think it's highly suspect that any private citizen would, pre-war own anything like that. I think for comparison it would be interesting to look at what private citizens in the US owned... probably not much at that time.
Dropping private ownership for a second think about how many weapons the US sent the Russians and the British through the lend lease program. Which, I think goes to the idea that there was a dearth of weapons in Europe for state actors let alone private individuals.