Is the production of small arms and ammunition dependent on the stability, governance and infrastructure of the nation-state system or are they being democratized along with drones, electronic warfare, and other forms of hardware with dual military/civilian purposes? This is of interest to me because out in California, you have to have a background check to buy ammo but friends on various police forces tell me they’re recovering more and more homemade pistols.
Firepower gets frequent discussion in this community even though we all agree that it’s vastly overemphasized and it’s often too late when it’s time to use weapons. Usually, situations that require weapons could have been resolved peacefully by other means earlier. Genocides are an important example. Populations are disarmed and murdered. However, resistance to such things doesn’t depend on weapons anywhere near as much as it depends on virtue and mindset. We look at disarmed populations and blame the lack of weapons for the subsequent genocide, but the victims were dead in their minds and souls long before they were physically murdered. Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously wrote that Stalin’s entire regime would’ve collapsed during the Great Terror if the Russians had attacked the henchmen rounding them up one-by-one with anything they had rather than cower in their collective housing cells:

“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 good-bye 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! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

H. John Poole notes that Asian guerrillas have historically had very little in the way of firepower but have ..

here: https://www.americanpartisan.org/2019/09/democratization-of-small-arms-production/