Is Trump Ready and Willing to Try Arming the Iranian People Again?

We still don’t have many details about what happened the first time the Trump administration tried to deliver small arms to resistance groups inside Iran earlier this year, other than the president’s comments that the guns never got to where they were going. Still, President Trump appears to be willing to give it another go, based on remarks he made to Salem Media’s Hugh Hewitt on Monday. 

“Well, look, the problem is you can’t — if you have five people with a gun, and 250,000 [without], the five people with a gun, assuming it’s used fast enough, which they do they’re going to win,” Trump said. “They have to, they don’t have weapons.” 

… He said if the Iranian people had guns, they would fight back.

“If they had guns, they would fight back,” Trump said. “I’m convinced of that. But you know, you can’t have an unarmed population against people with AK-47’s and stand there, even if you have 250,000 people.”

The White House amplified those comments on Tuesday with a post on X. 

.@POTUS on the Iranian people: “They want to protest, but they don’t have any guns. You could have 200,000 people protesting, and have 5 or 6 sick people with guns, and when they start shooting them right between the eyes… very few people would be able to stand there.” pic.twitter.com/Cnk5W21A66

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 5, 2026

Those comments certainly suggest that Trump is willing to make another attempt at arming some elements of the Iranian public. The bigger question is how would we go about it? 

We don’t know the extent of that first effort; how many guns were given to a third party with the expectation they’d be handed off to Iranians in-country, or what kind of small arms were delivered. President Trump has indicated, though, that the initial delivery never made it to its intended recipients, but was instead kept by the third party itself. 

How many guns would be needed in order for the Iranian people to have a legitimate chance of fighting back? When we talk about the Second Amendment serving as a check on tyranny here at home, it’s important to remember that the number of armed Americans dwarfs the total number of active duty military and law enforcement combined. Estimates of American gun owners range from 80 to 100-million, compared to 1.3 million service members and between 600,000 and 750,000 law enforcement officers. 

Iran has approximately 650,000 active duty military members and another 300,000 or so in reserve. Its total number of police officers is around 250,000, though about half that number are conscripts who are fulfilling mandatory service. 

Smuggling 5,000 or 10,000 firearms into Iran probably wouldn’t have much of an impact, unless those arms were directed specifically to groups that are hostile to the regime and based in Tehran and other major population centers. Even then, I’m not sure many Iranians would take to the streets in opposition to the IRGC unless they knew that those groups were armed and ready to fight back against the mass killings of protesters. 

I’m certainly not opposed to the idea of an armed populace rising up against the tyrannical leaders of the Islamic Republic. I just don’t know how easy it will be to get enough guns into the right hands to make a difference. 

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