That is a very controversial take for Americans, and not just from a gun-toter’s perspective. The US has a long history of gun violence, yes, but the US also has a long history of state corruption which only ended by guns driving that corruption back.
In 1946, Veterans in the town of Athens used their firearms to fight against a corrupt police department helping the standing state rig the elections.
In 1921 The Battle of Blair Mountain occurred, where West Virginia miners who’d been stuck in the exploitive company town employment model, battled along the ridges of Blair Mountain against Police. In the company towns you could be fired from your job and evicted from your home without trial - since the mining company owned the houses and only let employees use them - and being in a Union was a fireable offense. This was the largest labor uprising in US history, mine workers fighting deputy sheriffs and strike breakers, with the police actually using biplanes to drop bombs overtop the heads of the miners. This was apart of the Coal Wars of the US, and apart of the broader Labor Wars in the US, which eventually led to the pro-labor regulations we now have in place within the US (which are now being dismantled despite a massive rise in peaceful protests).
In 1968, the Holy Week Uprising occurred in response to Rev. Martin Luther King Junior’s assassination, and fueled by the massive inequality that the black community still faced.
All of these were cases of a overhead government, whether state, town, or federal, failing to provide for it citizens, and those citizens helping change that governments’ behaviour through violent armed uprising. It is a regular occurrence in American history for us to have corrupt officials who start setting inhumane policies, and it’s also been a regular occurrence for that corruption to need violent intervention in order for changes for the better to occur.
It seems MLK was exhausted by how ineffective peaceful protest throughout his campaigning, and communicated his doubts of whether peaceful means would actually work in his letter from Birmingham Jail. He stuck with peaceful means till he was assassinated, which is commendable.
After King’s death, the violent Holy Week Uprising occurred in response. At the end of that week, the Civil Rights Act had been passed. It sure seems like the Holy Week Uprising got some of what it wanted much faster than King’s years of peaceful protest. What King absolutely brought about, though, was a strong alignment for members of the Civil rights movement, which made the Uprising possible in the first place.
The civil rights movement was full of varied factions both violent and nonviolent, all contributing to it’s eventual partial success. We should not act as though MLK was the sole martyr of it all, though he played an important role. I’d argue that the US government props him up as a savior to try preventing anyone from thinking about violent means of resistance as a viable option. Same with Gandhi, same with Nelson Mandela.